A year of watching one market before buying anything
I gave myself twelve months of looking at Bali before allowing any decision, and I am glad I did.
In month three I wanted a villa near Canggu. By month nine I understood what leasehold versus freehold means in practice for a foreigner, why the notary matters more than the agent, and that the area I liked had doubled in traffic in two years. A friend who bought in 2019 walked me through her own paperwork line by line one evening, which was worth more than every article I had read until then.
I kept notes in a spreadsheet and pulled the listings from https://global-property.investments/ , one row per property, with the date I first saw it and what the asking price was that week. Watching the same listing sit unsold for eight months teaches you more than any market report, and three of them came back later with a different agent and a different number.
The place we are now in talks about is not in Canggu at all, and it is thirty percent cheaper than what I would have bought in month three.