How to check a developer's track record in Malaysia (15 minutes, mostly free)

It tells you how this company behaves when things get hard. Three signals matter:

• On-time delivery rate — what share of the group's past projects reached vacant possession on schedule. A group that delivered late twice tends to deliver late again; the pattern is more predictive than the showroom.
• Defect reputation — how the last handovers went. Buyer groups and defect-period complaints on past projects are the closest thing to a product review a developer gets.
• Abandoned or sick history — any project in the group's past that turned Sakit or Terbengkalai on the KPKT register. State this as register fact and weigh it heavily.

One structural caveat: a company can be new, but its directors aren't. Malaysian developers commonly launch each project under a fresh SPV (special-purpose vehicle), so the Sdn Bhd on your SPA may have zero history by design. That is a normal, factual industry structure — but it means the record you need is the group's and the directors', not the SPV's. An SSM search on the directors' names surfaces their other companies and what happened to those companies' projects.

1. KPKT's TEDUH register — teduh.kpkt.gov.my: every licensed Peninsular Malaysia housing project, its APDL number and expiry, progress status, and the Sakit/Terbengkalai/Lewat classifications. (Sabah and Sarawak run separate housing ordinances and are not in this register.)
2. Our free checker — semak-projek cross-references the register for you, and rekod pemaju shows a developer group's delivery record in one place instead of project by project.
3. SSM company search — SSM's e-Search lets you pull any Sdn Bhd's directors and their other directorships for a small fee. This is how you connect a "new" SPV to an old group.
4. The APDL on the advertisement — every legal housing ad must display the APDL number. No APDL number on the ad is itself a finding: an unlicensed sale sits outside Act 118's protections entirely.

In descending order of severity:

1. Expired or absent APDL. Walk away until resolved. Without a valid APDL there is no statutory Schedule G/H contract, no HDA account for your money, and no LAD regime — the whole protective framework is missing.
2. A prior Terbengkalai project in the group. The register records 179 abandoned projects nationally (TEDUH, as at 29 Aug 2026); a group that has already produced one carries the heaviest possible history. It is not an automatic no — rehabilitations happen — but it demands answers in writing.
3. Current Sakit projects in the group. Sakit means KPKT records the project as more than 30% behind schedule. One sick project in an otherwise-delivering group is different from a group with half its portfolio in trouble — how to read a Sakit listing.
4. A first-time SPV with no parent guarantee. New SPV + unknown directors + no established parent standing behind completion = you are underwriting a startup with a 30-year loan. Ask who guarantees completion, and get it in writing.

Price the risk, or walk. Most real developer records are mixed — a late project years ago, an otherwise clean sheet. Three practical responses:

• Demand paper. A written revised schedule for any currently-delayed project in the group, and the completion guarantee structure for yours. Verbal assurances from the sales gallery are not paper.
• Check what the crowd is doing. Compare construction progress against units sold — a project selling slowly and building slowly at the same time is compounding its own risk. Sell-through data is in our lists.
• Make the discount honest. If the record is mixed and the price carries no discount versus cleaner-record competitors nearby, the risk is unpaid. Either the price compensates you, or a cleaner project deserves your booking fee — the full pre-booking sweep is in red flags before buying a condo.