About
An analytical publication about the Bali property market, in five editions. One promise holds the rest together: every figure carries a source and the date it was last checked.
Betterplace Journal is published by Betterplace, which sells and manages property in Bali. The newsroom holds no listings of its own.
No writer covers a property the company is selling. This is not a footnote in small type; it is the condition that makes everything else possible. Disclosure does not disqualify anyone. Concealment disqualifies permanently.
What this is
We report on what happens after a purchase — management, licences, tax, resale — and on how people lose money along the way. The journal publishes in English, Russian, Korean, Japanese and Spanish. Three of those editions carry local originals rather than translations: what a Japanese, a Korean and a Spanish tax resident must declare about the same villa are different obligations, not one article in three languages.
What we promise
- Every figure carries a source and the date it was last checked.
- Every statement carries one of three confidence statuses — verified, estimate, unverified. There is nothing in between.
- A calculation of ours is an estimate, even when every input to it is verified.
- We describe risk. We do not sell it and we do not inflate it.
How each of those is enforced, and what a source has to be before a number may rest on it, is set out in how we check facts.
What we never publish
The list is closed.
- Figures without a source.
- Yield forecasts without a disclosed method.
- Pieces promoting a specific property — including a property Betterplace is selling.
- Accusations against a named party without documents.
- Copy written by an agency marketing team under an owner’s byline.
- Machine translation not edited by a native speaker.
- A piece by an author who has not disclosed a financial interest.
When we are wrong
We do not delete a piece. A correction records what changed, why, and who reported it; a retracted piece keeps its address and carries the retraction on it. Deleting would be worse than the error, because it removes the ability to check us. The log is public.