the hottest developer’s playground in Chiang Mai condos here now & coming soon to a festival mall near you

At a smidge over 40 square kilometres, the actual municipality of Chiang Mai is pretty small by most standards. Yet the housing market here has long been anything but. So it was inevitable that, in time, land plots inside the city would be more and more tough to come by. And those still up for grabs, bearing a hefty price tag. So it was that, with the expansion of Chiang Mai’s road and transport infrastructure, a handful of years ago Thai real estate developers started focusing their attention on the outskirts of the city.

Since then, no other part of the city fringes has become such a magnet for new condominiums especially than that around CentralFestival. From throwing open its doors in mid-November 2013, no fewer than 16 named condo developments have launched within one kilometre of the megamall!  Right now (2021), all are are move-in-ready:

• Boat condo
• dcondo nim
• dcondo sign
• My Hip 2 condo
• One+ Business Park 2 condo
• One+ Business Park 3 condo
• Supalai Monte @ Viang Chiang Mai condo
• The Spring condo
• The Treasure condo
• dcondo ping
• dcondo Rin

• ESCENT Chiang Mai condo
• One+ Business Park 4 condo
• Siri condo [on Soi 1 Pa Kae and not to be confused with the condo off Siri Mangkalajarn Road which shares the same name!]
• Supalai Monte II condo
• U-Home condo
• Plus one project hot off the press:
• ESCENT VILLE Chiang Mai condo

If that’s not impressive enough, the properties together will encompass 33 separate condo buildings and a whopping 7000 odd individual units. With a mere two vertical residences (One+ Business Park 1 and the positively archaic, Sri Anan) existing earlier in the same neck of the woods, the complement of condo developments has then exploded by 800% in scarcely more than four years!

So what, you may ask, is the big deal with this particular patch of Chiang Mai? For starters, there’s the gravitational pull of the space-age CentralFestival itself. With six storeys and 250,000 square metres of floor space, the largest of its kind not just in Chiang Mai but the entirety of Northern Thailand. Besides anchoring a Central department store, sheltering upwards of 300 shops and the go-to venue for big name British brands, the mall’s home to arguably the finest supermarket (Central Food Hall) in all Chiang Mai as well as no end of eateries. Not to mention featuring an ultramodern multiplex cinema, ice-skating rink and international fitness club on top of offering free shuttle minivans and songthaew which run daily to stops throughout the Nimmanhaemin neighbourhood, the ‘Old City’, Chiang Mai airport and the Night Bazaar.

Cutting right through the area and connecting directly to elsewhere in the city is the Super Highway section of the Chiang Mai-Lampang Frontage Road. Not least the nearby Chiang Mai Business Park starring Big C Extra, the largest and most affordable hypermarket in town bar none. Just inside the area too is Chiang Mai’s main provincial transport station with access to a fleet of city buses, red songthaew, tuk tuk, motorbike taxis and private cabs serving local destinations to say nothing of the dozens of long-distance buses for travel throughout the Kingdom and even as far as Laos.

As it happens, the area’s also been filling up slowly but surely with other residential and commercial interests so it’s little wonder that around CentralFestival is being hailed as an emerging Central Business District and even, by some, as the next Nimman! While land close to the mall has skyrocketed in value more than fivefold during recent years, there’s still a fair bit of it to be had. So expect a whole load more condo developments in the area in the not too distant future!

We would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this area, do you think there are too many units in this location? Did you buy in the business park? Please post below!!!