The dangers of renting a building here in Da Nang

Small business owners have pretty limited options as far as location location location is concerned here in the beach areas of Da Nang. I know quite a few small business owners here and they are always living in fear that their area is going to become too popular and the landlord is going to double or triple their rent or even worse, just outright tell them than their business is no longer allowed to renew the lease.

This can be very problematic and expensive because most of these businesses don't make very much money anyway and when they took over the building they took over an empty shell or in some cases a plot of land that barely had a structure on it.

I want to focus on a business called Hermanos that I first met when they were operating out of a stall in an outdoor food court of sorts. The place was wildly popular even though it was small. So when Covid happened and that place shut down entirely, they took a huge gamble on opening a much larger place that is pictured above. I wouldn't say that they had excellent food, but it was pretty decent and the staff, especially the owner Nancy were extremely nice people. Because of this they managed to remain busy-ish in their new building, despite the odds being stacked against them due to limited tourism and the fact that they had never tried to have a building this size.

When they took over the place, they were only dealing with a very bare bones existing structure. The electrical and plumbing was a mess and nobody even really knows what sort of business was there before. It certainly didn't seem like a restaurant.

When they decided to move in they had build most of the structure themselves. They did this as cheaply as they could while still making the area presentable and decided on an outdoor wood-fired over for pizzas and later expanded into mexican food such as tacos and nachos. Both of these were passable and "good enough" especially when you consider that Mexican food just generally speaking is not very good in Vietnam.

Here we are a year later and I was walking one day and saw Nancy moving some stuff and was told by her that the landlord has decided to not renew their contract and not much more information was given to them.

All the work that they had put into building this garden area, all the electrical installation, the gigantic pizza oven, and the surrounding walls and built in seating was all either going to be moved or it would be confiscated by the owner of the land after the lease expired.

After Nancy and Co. vacated the premises the owners made quick work of completely demolishing the structures they had built and this is what that plot of land looks like today.

I do not know what the plans are for the land but if the rest of the neighborhood can be any indication they are almost certainly going to build a bunch of high-rise condos or a hotel with a small, exactly-the-same-as-everyone else business on the ground floor. This seems to be the case with almost anyone in this area and it is an eventuality even though there are already entirely too many rooms that are vacant at the moment.

Hermanos was not a big business. It was a very small business that was barely getting by and was owned by one person. I don't expect the rich land owners to actually care about the little guy but that was exactly the case here and before anyone starts to think that Nancy was singled out because she is a foreigner you can forget about that because Nancy is a Vietnamese woman whose name is definitely not actually Nancy.

This is something that all small business owners need to consider when they are thinking of setting up shop over here. For one thing there is a better-than-average chance that you are not going to make any money to being with and the buildings are almost certainly going to contain almost nothing and it will up to you to retrofit them to suit your business needs. Then after all of that is done there is a very good chance that the owner of the building is not going to consider your sunk costs into their plans of selling it out from under you. There is a good reason why the leases on these places are almost never longer than 2 years after all.

Nancy has already moved Hermanos to another location and once again this was done at her own expense.

This new location is not as attractive as far as tourists are concerned but one benefit is that it isn't a popular area for turning everything into high-rise condos as it has no beach access. That will probably mean she is safe there for a couple of years.