News

PropertyGuru Foresees Potential Uptrend In Residential Property Prices

Last update: 01/06/2017

KUALA LUMPUR, June 1 (Bernama) -- PropertyGuru, an online property portal, foresees a potential uptrend in prices of residential properties -- landed and high rise units, going forward, driven by improved market sentiment.

Malaysia Country Manager Sheldon Fernandez said the trend over the next few quarters could also be determined by sentiment of owners and developers towards the market.

"From our quarterly survey for the last two years beginning 2015, we can see the market sentiment has shifted from downward to stabilise and began the upward trend in the first quarter of this year.

"This indicated that the local property sector could be bottoming out," he told reporters at the launch of the PropertyGuru Market Index (PMI) for Malaysia here, today.

PMI is a comprehensive, insightful quarterly overview of home pricing trends at nationwide level, as well as the key property markets of Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Johor and Penang.

The index is derived from PropertryGuru's extensive proprietary data, which includes, but nor limited to, the asking prices of over 250,000 residential property listings on PropertyGuru.com.my.

The index also considers supply volume of properties from both the primary and secondary markets.

For the first quarter of this year, Fernandez said that the PMI showed a marginal increased of 0.2 per cent to 90.1 basis points for property prices in Malaysia as compared to 89.9 basis points recorded in the previous quarter.

The PMI for the residential property prices had been in a downward momentum since the fourth quarter of 2015, he said.

"We believe that the insights delivered in the index can help consumers to better understand the real estate market, helping them to time their property purchases better and give them a greater sense of property market movements," he said.

Going forward, he said the company projected that prices would be affected by inflationary pressures due to rising living costs, availability and accessibility to financing and overall conditions of the macro-economic environment.

"The next quarter will provide a clearer indication of how the property market has performed in the first half of this year and possibly give us a trend line for the rest of the year," he added.

-- BERNAMA