Your villa isn't selling. It shouldn't cost you money to wait.

A villa on the market in Koh Samui for eight months is not standing still. Common-area fees, electricity and water keep going out. Nobody is opening the windows, so the pool needs more work, the garden gets away from you and the aircon sits unused until it doesn't start. And the longer it sits, the more pressure there is to do the one thing you didn't want to do — drop the asking price.

Letting it on a one-year tenancy solves the cash side and breaks the sale: you can no longer hand a buyer an empty house. Leaving it empty keeps the sale clean and costs you every single month. This is the option in between.

How it works

• We assess the villa — condition, furniture, what it would actually achieve, and whether its location supports short stays at all.
• We agree the terms in writing before anything starts, including what you receive and how long the commitment runs.
• We take over the day-to-day: cleaning, linen, guest handling, utilities, the small failures — a dead bulb, a blocked drain, a pump that trips.
• Viewings are protected. You get fixed windows every week for buyers, bookable in advance, and we stop taking new bookings once a sale goes to contract.
• When it sells, you leave. That is written into the front of the agreement, not buried at the back.

Three ways in, not one

Different villas need different things, and the right starting point is usually the lightest one.

What this actually looks like

These are measured, not modelled. Over May to August 2026 the houses Chowrest manages sold 79 nights and paid out ฿203,660 to their owners — ฿2,578 a night. Over the seven months before that, short stays across the same portfolio ran at ฿2,656 a night in booking value.

The nightly rate is the easy part. How often a house is booked is not. Across those four months the busiest house in the portfolio sold 44 nights — about ฿28,000 a month — while the quietest sold three. The portfolio average works out near ฿8,500 a month per house, before costs and before whatever split applies.

We are showing you the spread rather than the middle of it, because the middle is not what your villa will earn. Which end it lands on is the thing we work out before either of us commits.

Two things we would rather say up front than have you find out later:

• That is our current portfolio, not a forecast for your villa. Those villas were chosen and set up for short stays. A villa that has struggled to sell has often struggled for reasons — access, layout, position, price — that affect what it can let for too. We work out the number for your villa before either of us commits, not after.
• These are four and seven-month windows, not a full year, and the year is not flat. September to November is low season on Samui and runs below these figures; December to February runs above them. Any number quoted from a single good month is not a number you can plan around.

What it is being compared with is not zero, either. A villa sitting empty on the market still runs common-area fees, electricity and water every month, and the maintenance you defer while nobody is there costs more later. The gap between those two is the whole point — not the headline rate.

And a reason this helps the sale

A villa with a real, documented income record is a different proposition to a buyer. It stops being a house someone has to fall in love with and becomes something an investor can price on what it earns. Chowrest already works with buyers who look at Samui property exactly that way, which is why a letting history during the wait tends to help the sale rather than get in its way.

Common questions