HomeGuru.com.my country manager Steven Tan said there is a lot of interest among overseas investors to buy homes in Malaysia via the Malaysia My Second Home programme, especially in places like Sabah, Kuala Lumpur and Johor.

“As for Penang, the trend is different as many locals are snapping up properties there, mostly luxury condos,” Tan said in an interview with Business Times.

He added that another emerging trend in the Penang property market was that in recent months, there has been a lot of interest among Singapore investors to snap up heritage buildings on the island.

“You will be surprised that after Malaysians and Singaporeans, the third most visits we get for our website are the Europeans,”
he said.

On HomeGuru’s recently concluded survey, in which some 2,800 people were interviewed on the local property market, Tan said 63 per cent of the respondents felt that properties across the board in Malaysia were expensive.

The survey also revealed that 78 per cent of the respondents felt that bungalows were the most expensive type of property.
Tan added that some 18 per cent of the respondents also indicated that they were planning to invest overseas in the coming months.

HomeGuru is a Singapore company which has been in Malaysia for slightly under a year. Its 11-month-old website has about three
million visitors a month, Tan said, adding the Malaysian HomeGuru website has over 10,000 agents with more than 70,000 properties to buy and sell.

HomeGuru is the second most popular property portal in the country, but it holds pole position in three other countries,
namely Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.

SOURCE: Business Times