Malaysia's National Property Information Centre (Napic) hopes the property market will be allowed to continue despite the reimposition of the conditional movement control order (CMCO) in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor on Wednesday.

Napic director Aina Edayu Ahmad said the property market is an important sector within any national economy.

“Given the CMCO, we hope the economic sectors will be able to operate. If this is the case, we would not see too much impact on the economy.

“However, having said that, we have yet to see the CMCO restrictions that are being imposed on the economy,” she said at a press conference at the Property Market Outlook for 2020 – Beyond Covid.

She said the property market is a very broad one and is an essential sector within the economy.

Earlier, Aina presented an overview of the property sector for the first half of this year.

She said price of residential houses continued to record slow growth in the second quarter of this year with the Malaysian House Price Index (MHPI) at 198.3 points.

This indicates a marginal annual growth of 0.4 per cent, lower than the 1.9 per cent growth recorded in the first quarter.

On a quarterly basis, MHPI declined by 0.7 per cent compared to the first quarter (199.7 points).

Aina’s paper drew attention to the serviced apartment segment, where numbers of overhang units kept increasing over the years.

There were 21,683 overhang units recorded worth 18.64 billion ringgit ($4.5 billion), an increase of 26.5 per cent in volume and 32.8 per cent in value as compared to the first half of last year (17,142 units worth 15.04 billion ringgit).

In terms of price range, serviced apartment units priced more than 500,000 ringgit make up 90.8 per cent of serviced apartment overhang.

Johor’s serviced apartment units priced 500,000 ringgit and above make up 96.86 per cent of the unsold completed units for this type of high-rise commercial, and Selangor 69.13 per cent.

THE STAR (MALAYSIA)/ASIA NEWS NETWORK