Buying a New Home? In the Same Area, the Cheaper Ones Mostly Made Money Later. The Most Expensive Ones Mostly Did Not.

Picture two buyers in the same town. Ali buys a new condo for RM350,000. Ben buys a bigger, fancier new condo nearby for RM900,000. Years later both sell.

What usually happens? Ali's kind of condo typically sold for about 31% more than he paid. Ben's kind typically sold for about 2% less than he paid.

How we got this: for each area, we lined up all the new projects from cheapest to most expensive and split them into three equal groups: cheap, middle, expensive. Then we looked up what the same homes sold for later on the second-hand market.

• Condos and apartments. Cheap group: 88 out of 100 made money, typically +31%. Expensive group: only 42 out of 100 made money, typically -2%.
• Landed houses. Cheap group: 97 out of 100 made money, typically +71%. Expensive group: 56 out of 100 made money, typically +4%.

This happened in almost every area we checked: 15 out of 16 areas for condos, 37 out of 38 for landed houses.

Why? When you sell, your buyer needs a bank loan. Many more people can get a loan for RM400,000 than for RM1 million. More possible buyers means an easier sale at a better price.

We matched each development's first sales by the developer with later resales of the same homes. Within every district, we sorted the groups of homes by first-sale price and compared the cheapest group with the most expensive group. Same district, same period, same type of home. Only the price level differs.

• High-rise: cheapest group typical +31.4% (88% of groups of homes made money). Priciest group typical -2.3% (42% made money). The cheaper group won in 15 of 16 districts.
• Landed: cheapest group typical +71.4% (97% made money). Priciest group typical +3.8% (56% made money). The cheaper group won in 37 of 38 districts.

Subsidised homes were removed first. Rumah Selangorku, PR1MA and similar schemes are sold below market by design, so their resale gain is the subsidy being cashed in, not a market return. We removed every group of homes whose first-sale price was under 75% of the resale typical for the same district, year, type and size. That was 466 groups of homes, 11% of the total. The result above is what is left.

1. Compare within the district, not across the country. "Cheap" here means cheap for that district. A RM450,000 condo can be the expensive group in one district and the cheap group in another.

2. Look at the net price. New launches in Malaysia are fixed-price: every buyer gets the same package. The figure to compare is the net price after the package, which is what goes into the sale and purchase agreement.

3. At the top end, ask who buys it from you later. Fewer than half of the priciest high-rise groups of homes resold above what the first buyer paid. If you are buying at the top of a district's range, buy it to live in, and plan to hold.

4. This is a pattern, not a promise. One in eight cheaper high-rise groups of homes still lost money. Check the project itself: sell-through, developer record, and what nearby resale homes go for.