Our main purpose is to make it our retirement home but hope to rent it out in the meantime. Our greatest fear is that it may turn out to be a bad decision as soo many people have advised us against buying a house in JB, citing reasons such as the property will have no value. I also noticed that mainly HH and EL are being discussed here as opposed to LFR. I wonder why because we think LFR is lovely though just a bit further from Nusajaya.
In a big country like Malaysia, your fear of getting a property having no value(caused by no demand) in the future is real if you get one in the wrong location. A property's value is All about its Location. Iskandar Region is 3 times the size of Singapore but most people zoom into Horizon Hills, East Ledang and other developments around Bukit Indah area because we know this important point.
Leisure farm(LF) is actually right beside East Ledang and Medini but presently they only have entrance/exit points via the old Gelang Patah town. For now, the area with the highest chance for success in Iskandar Region is Nusajaya City as it has already received many committed investments. Sad to say, the success of Nusajaya city doesn't necessarily guarantees the success of LF, but I think LF will have a better chance to prosper if they can open the proposed future entrance/exit via Medini, but who can guarantee that it will surely happen? For me, I won't gamble my money on LF now and pray that it will happen.
If I were you, who prefer the lifestyle and environment of LF more than other developments and I want to secure a unit now and rent it out until my retirement days. I would choose a unit in a location where there are rental demand at present so that I can easily rent it out. I don't think you can rent out a unit in LF easily at present, but HH and and EL are already seeing rental demand. By the time I reach my retirement age and LF develops well, I can sell away my unit in HH or EL and get one in LF,thus beating the inflated price of LF with my HH or EL.
High crime rates and even security guards who gang up with robbers to rob homes when the owners are away, government may change laws, etc. I would appreciate any constructive feedback as I understand there are many JB home owners here. Thanks!
To develop Iskandar Region, Malaysian government started off by putting in hundreds of millions on their police force to make Iskandar a safe place to work, live and play. What we can see in real life in recent years is that their effort had already effectively brought down crime rate in Johor quite significantly.
At present, HH and EL also have better security features as compared to LF. Eg, Perimeter fencing with Motion detection, anti-cutting and anti-climbing, infra red to detect intrusion at night, Surveillance camera capturing every part of the fencing etc as compared to a normal brick wall fencing of LF. Till date, the security guards of LF, HH and EL are proven to be of higher caliber than cheap developments which employ the cheapest labour they can find just to sit in their guardhouse, of course such people are more prone to commit crimes.
Even if the Malaysian government change laws tomorrow to scrap most part of Iskandar Region, it makes no sense to scrap Nusajaya as all the committed projects mean a lot of profit for themselves. Plus they themselves had already spent billions in infrastructure like roads and transportation and Kota Iskandar(Johor State Admin Centre) is already up and running in Nusajaya. Don't you think they would want to make all these money back rather than to kill the projects in Nusajaya?
