700,000 houses needed in Iskandar Malaysia till 2025
JOHOR BARU: Iskandar Malaysia needs to have between 600,000 and 700,000 units of residential properties from now until 2025 to cater for a boom in population.
Iskandar Regional Development Authority (Irda) chief executive officer Datuk Ismail Ibrahim said when the country’s first economic corridor was launched on Nov 4, 2006, the population in Iskandar Malaysia was about 1.49 million people.
“As of this year, the figure has gone up to 1.95 million and by 2025, we are expecting to have about three million people living within Iskandar Malaysia,” he said.
Ismail said this after signing a memorandum of understanding with the Valuation and Property Services Deparment, iProperty.com. my, Nextdor Property Communications and REI Group on data sharing.
The Valuation and Property Services Deparment was represented by director-general Nordin Daharom, iProperty by general manager David Mawer, Nextdor Property by executive director Imran Clyde and REI Group by CEO Daniele Gambero.
“Demand for affordable residential properties in Iskandar Malaysia is encouraging as of now and developers should build more houses in this category,” said Ismail.
He foresees the property outlook for Iskandar Malaysia to remain buoyant in the years to come with the influx of domestic and foreign investors.
This will push demand for properties within the region, said Ismail.
He said the economic growth corridor had received RM263.95bil in committed accumulated investment from 2006 until June 30, 2018.
Ismail said from the total figure, RM154.14bil or 58% have been realised and from the RM263.95bil figure, RM161bil or 61% were from domestic investors while foreign investors contributed RM102.9bil or 39%.
“Both domestic and foreign investors continued to show interest in Iskandar Malaysia despite challenges in the global economic situation,” he said.
Meanwhile, Nordin said statistics showed that more that 40% of residential properties sold in Malaysia were those with average price tags between RM200,000 and RM300,000 each.
“Based on the transactions done, developers should build more of such residential properties to cater for demand from house buyers,” he said.