If it's not broken, don't fix it. Plus Property Partners is again offering more middle-income city apartments for Bt1 million to Bt3 million, because buyers can't seem to get enough of them.

"The problem we have is actually not with sales, which are going quite well," said Plus CEO Mayta Chanchamcharat. "It's building them on time. Another problem is securing good sites for our new projects."

These are the kinds of problems more developers would die for.

More remarkably, Plus sales of these condominiums and mid-town town houses have brought in more than Bt5 billion in sales.

For Mayta, the success only goes to prove that city apartments located near mass transit are today in great demand, because they provide convenient dwellings for urban workers fed up with wasting many hours commuting from distant places daily.

These urban workers also aspire to have some sort of life, not xblowing a quarter of their lives stuck in miserable, stressful gridlocked traffic. The worst areas are along Sukhumvit and Bang Na-Trat roads, where chaotic road construction and industrial traffic make life a living hell for inhabitants there.

As such, Plus' Condo One and its larger Condo One X projects have reaped plenty of takers since the start of the year.

Throughout intense political clashes earlier this year, home-buyers ignored the rabid outbursts of desperate politicians and invested in Plus homes.

"So far, we've launched 10 Condo One projects and two Condo X sites," said Maytha. "They are 80-per-cent booked."

Last week, Plus added two more Condo One sites: Condo One Soho near Chinatown and Condo One Lat Phrao Station in Lat Phrao Soi 18.

The Soho project is named after London's Chinatown, for reasons best known to Thai Anglophiles, while the Lat Phrao Station site takes advantage

of its proximity to a subway station.

With petrol prices still rather high and inflation keeping mortgage rates on the high side, Mayta expects more people to downgrade, leaving their bigger homes in distant suburbs for more practical accommodation in town.

The Condo One condominiums priced between Bt1.2 million and Bt3 million have seen strong sales, because many developers were chasing the high-end segment and ignoring the lower-margin sectors.

With a month and a left in 2006, Mayta says Plus expects to book about Bt5.7 billion in sales for the year.

"We're actually running out of stock, both condominiums and town houses," he said.

"Our condominium buyers are mostly 30 to 40 years old, salaried employees, and their budgets for homes are usually limited."

"Demand for housing from this segment is real. Regardless of the day-to-day political

and economic fluctuations,

people need a roof over their heads."

Plus' latest condominium designs are called Condo One X, with the "X" standing for "extras". It has two Condo One X sites: one in Narathiwat Soi 24 with 490 units and the other in Sukhumvit Soi 26 with 319 units.

They have swimming pools, Internet areas and laundry rooms. Most normal Condo Ones sites, such as Soho, do not have pools, because the smaller scale cannot accommodate them.

Because these projects are of a larger scale, however, Plus needs a longer period to deliver them to buyers. Condo One X sites will take three years to complete.

The smaller Condo One sites will take about two years.

"Eight months must be set aside for the mandatory environmental-impact assessment study alone," he said. "With the backlog of projects awaiting approval, that could be delayed further."

Itthi C Tan

The Nation