The 8 Things Condo Residents Complain About Most, and How to Pick a Well-Managed Building

Start with a common story. Wei finds a condo he likes: walking distance to the LRT, a fair price, a nice show unit. Three months after moving in he learns that only two of the four lifts have worked for a long time, so mornings mean a ten-minute wait. A friend who visits gets shouted at by a guard. He complains to the management office and nobody replies. None of this showed on the day he viewed the unit, but he meets it every day he lives there.

This is not a one-off. We took the resident reviews of 439 condos, pulled out the 628 that gave one or two stars, and sorted them one by one. This is the ranking (one review can complain about several things):

The top two are both about people: whether anyone answers you, and how the guards treat people. A broken thing on its own does not make a resident angry enough to write a bad review. A thing left broken for a year does.

The more units, the smaller the units and the newer the building, the higher the chance of a low rating. "Rated low" here means residents rate it below 3.8 stars out of 5. A typical condo sits at about 4.1.

Why does this happen? In a 1,000-unit building, hundreds of people wait for the lifts and leave the car park at the same time every morning, and the guards handle hundreds of visitors and deliveries a day. The same standard of management that works for a small building cannot keep up once the crowd is that big. In buildings with small units, almost half of the bad reviews involve short-stay guests: more people coming and going, and neighbours who do not know each other.

Two findings that go against the usual belief:

• New buildings are not easier to run than old ones. Buildings handed over within the last 10 years are rated low almost twice as often as buildings that are 11 to 20 years old. A building that still scores well after more than ten years has management that has been tested.
• Expensive does not mean well managed. Out of every 100 mid-range, upper mid-range and high-end condos, 17, 13 and 12 are rated low. That is close to no difference.

A big block is not a building to avoid. Among the 1,000-unit blocks we looked at, a few score 4.2 stars and above. Buying into a big block just means checking a few more things, covered below.

Step one: look at two numbers, the total number of units and the main unit size. Among buildings whose main unit size is 1,200 sq ft and above, 3 in every 10 score 4.4 stars or higher. Among blocks with more than 1,000 units, fewer than 1 in 10 do. The agent or the sales gallery can answer both. Just ask.

Step two: read the resident reviews, but read them the right way. Search the building name on Google Maps. Four points:

1. There must be enough reviews. With fewer than 30, do not trust the star count. One or two people can pull it up or down.
2. Read only the last year. Management companies get replaced. We read plenty of "much better since the new management took over", and also "it used to be great, the current one is bad". A good review from years ago says nothing about today.
3. Skip the ones praising the location. In buildings rated low, 6 in every 10 good reviews praise the convenient location. In highly rated buildings it is only 4 in 10. The location is real, but it does not tell you whether living there is comfortable. The extra good reviews in highly rated buildings talk about quiet, greenery and good upkeep.
4. Go and read the one-star and two-star reviews on purpose. See whether they complain about the same thing. If six in ten bad reviews mention the lifts, the lifts really are a problem.

Step three: five minutes on site, four things to check. Do it on the day you view the unit:

1. Exchange a few words with the guard. How he treats you at visitor registration is how he will treat your family, your friends and your delivery riders every day.
2. Press the button for every lift. Is there an "under maintenance" notice, and how long has it been there? In a big block, do the sum: how many units share how many lifts.
3. Walk through the car park. Are the lights on, is the floor clean, are there enough visitor bays? Go in the evening or at night if you can.
4. Look at the notice board. Is there a recent summary of accounts, a general meeting notice, a repair update? A management that is willing to put its accounts on the wall is usually not afraid of people looking.

Ask how much of the maintenance fee is actually collected, how much is left in the sinking fund, and whether short-stay rentals are allowed in the building. The first two decide whether the building will have money to fix things later. The third decides who your neighbours are.

1. How much of the maintenance fee is collected? In a building where many owners are behind on payment, there is never enough money whatever the fee is set at, and the next thing is lifts nobody can afford to repair. If you are buying a subsale unit, ask the seller or the agent to show you the audited accounts from the latest annual general meeting of owners. The figure is in there.
2. How much is left in the sinking fund? This is the money kept for big repairs: replacing lifts, repainting, fixing the roof. In a building that is no longer young and has a thin sinking fund, big repairs get charged to whoever owns the units at that time, in one go. That could be you. To judge whether the numbers are reasonable, see maintenance fee and sinking fund.
3. Are short-stay rentals allowed? One in every four bad reviews has something to do with short-stay guests. The Federal Court ruled in 2020 that a condo's management body may pass a by-law banning short-stay rentals, so the rule differs from building to building and you have to ask. Details are in is Airbnb legal in a Malaysian condo.

Owners have the right to apply to the management office to see these documents, so the seller can get them. If they cannot be produced, that is an answer in itself. For the full list of documents and warning signs, see the JMB and MC owner's guide.

Buying into a 1,000-unit block? Check three more things: how many visitor bays there are, how many units each lift has to serve, and how many guards are on each shift. These are the three things big blocks get complained about most, and most of the answer was fixed when the building was designed.

No, it does not rise more. But it is more comfortable to live in, and the rent is a little higher. The money buys you a better daily life, not a bigger gain.

Many people say good management can lift a property's value by 20% to 30%. We checked that against actual sale records and could not find it:

• The price rise is almost the same. For ten years running there has been a media award for best-managed properties (The Edge Malaysia Best Managed & Sustainable Property Awards). Compared with condos in the same area, the same price range and of the same age, the winning condos rose less than 3% more over eight years. The gap is too small to tell apart from chance. Comparing buildings with high resident ratings against those with low ratings gives the same result.
• The rent is higher, but the return is the same. For every extra star in the resident rating, rent per square foot is a little over 10% higher. But those buildings also cost more to buy, so whatever the rating, the gross rental return works out to about 4%.
• The higher price was there from the start. The winning condos now sell for over 40% more per square foot than condos of the same age in the same area. The benefit of good management is already in the price when you buy.

What does this mean for you? If you will live there, management is the quality of your everyday life, and it is worth paying more for. If you are buying purely to invest, do not expect a bigger gain just because of the words "well managed". What it gives you is tenants who stay longer, fewer empty months and fewer complaints, not a higher return.

For those who want the details: where the data comes from