Because of a lot of different factors, Da Nang has become extremely popular with digital nomads in the past 2-3 years. Much of this has to do with it becoming popular right at the start of the crazy Covid times when the rest of the world was locking down or already locked down and Vietnam was carrying on as normal. During the first 6 months or so of the lockdowns and masking and all these other things that caused so much controversy and fighting around the world, Vietnam just carried on as usual and even had the doors open for a while. During that time a lot of people that live in various other parts of SouthEast Asia decided to come over here and once the world returned to normal, a lot of those people decided to stay.
The other reason would be that Thailand, who was famous for always being the number one expat place in this part of the world (or perhaps even in the entire world in general) started being much more difficult to obtain visas to whereas Vietnam is and always has been quite easy to get visas to.
That's great and all and more people spending money is good for an economy I guess but there is one thing that has really gone bad during those times and especially in the past 2 years. The rental market had basically doubled in cost and now people are charging rather silly rent - relative for the area, of course - and things are getting to be a bit ridiculous.
Almost all apartments that you can get your hands on over here are very similar. They have a boring floor plan and for some reason all of them seem to contain the same, extremely uncomfortable beds and sofas. It is expected that when you move into a place that you are going to purchase a mattress topper and the default beds tend to have the squish factor of a plank of wood.
They also are normally very drab and well this one, it looks like they tried to be a bit different but in the end it is just tacky looking as hell.
Agents also have been using some half-truths when advertising these things on various avenues and the landowners years ago did this silly trick years ago that makes me turn around straight away as soon as I see one. You can tell by the two pictures above that the main living room has some glass paneling going down the middle of it and on the other side of that is a bedroom.
This is because a while back it was determined or discovered that foreigners in particular, do not like studio rooms, they want a separate bedroom that is a completely different place than where their sofa and kitchen table are. This unit clearly just cut the living room in half and put a wall up there. This 2nd “bedroom” was never meant to actually be a bedroom, they just made it so later.
The gaudy and quite frankly AWFUL furniture that they have in these places look like something out an outdated and tacky hotel / motel, not like something that a person would actually choose as furniture if they went shopping on their own. Your combination living room / kitchen / foyer / hallway to me is just atrocious and the horrible pattern of the tile somehow manages to make it even more depressing. That kitchen prep area is so small that just making a sandwich would be a pain let alone anything of substance and the single hob cooking surface is so bad that it makes me feel bad for anyone that actually ends up staying here.
The fun doesn't end there though. Let's look at the bedroom which was certainly the only real bedroom when this unit was originally built. So small that there is virtually zero space on either side of the bed and the bed itself is just awful. I don't even want to think about how filthy that upholstered headboard must be.
This "laundry room" and balcony is actually the only real selling point of the place because at least they have proper front-loading machines and that is a lot more rare than it should be. Whoever was in charge of their tile patters though, that person needs to be found and punished. Just awful.
There are a lot of bad apartments in the world though and that isn't really the problem here. The problem is that this apartment, which normally wouldn't be worth anything other than "whatever we can get someone to pay us" is going for 22 million VND per month which is really close to $1000 a month.
Forget what you know about rentals if you are from a western country ok? $1000 a month here is so high that almost zero of the local population would be able to get that much money together even as a family. Most of Vietnam subsides off of less than $500 a month total income.
Even for the relatively affluent expat population very few people I know pay $1000 a month. My apartment is $700 and that is only because I got it before the price hikes hit.
Oh and the trickery on the part of the agents is something that really irritates me. They lie frequently such as how they have this apartment listed as "seaview" while at the same time they post pictures from the balconies that clearly show that it definitely is NOT seaview. I guess nobody told them what that word actually means.
This situation is pretty bad right now but it might just be a market correction. People are going to charge as much as they can for a thing they have for sale and well, I guess they should. At the moment Da Nang is really struggling with a bit of a housing problem but there are so many condo builds going on right now that I think the industry is going to collapse in on itself once these buildings are complete. There are 4 absolutely MASSIVE condo buildings that are near completion and once those are done and people start moving, things like this absolutely horrible-looking "2 bedroom seaview" that I have pictured above will be forced to drop back to charging next to nothing.
Sadly, this will probably result in the business or building owner simply tearing the place down and starting over thereby ensuring that the construction noise continues forever.