Young buyers flock to property market

Why millennials are flocking to real estate

Interest rate cuts, govt incentives spur buying interests

“We believe the strong growth in our young buyers is both a natural evolution and as a result of a conscious strategic effort we have made to appeal to this important customer group,"-
Datuk Chang Khim Wah

 

Eco World Development Group Bhd president and chief executive officer Datuk Chang Khim Wah told StarBiz the increase in younger buyers was due to a conscious strategic effort made by the group to appeal to this target market.

Property developers are seeing a pick up in sales, especially from younger buyers, as the numerous interest rate cuts and government incentives have spurred buying interest.

Eco World Development Group Bhd president and chief executive officer Datuk Chang Khim Wah said the increase in younger buyers was due to a conscious strategic effort made by the group to appeal to this target market.

“During our initial years of operations (circa 2015) the percentage of young buyers (below 40 years old) was around 43% and today it is more than 70%.

“We believe the strong growth in our young buyers is both a natural evolution and as a result of a conscious strategic effort we have made to appeal to this important customer group, both through the products we are offering as well as the way in which we engage them via social media and digital channels, ” he told StarBiz.

Of the 70%, Chang said around 50% are in their 30s and the remaining 20% are in their 20s. “We are particularly happy that a good number of these buyers include children of our own customers and residents in the vicinity of our development. This validates our efforts over the last few years to make a strong pivot to serve the needs of this market segment and the wider M40 group.

“Our upcoming launch of the new Duduk series of vertical townships offering semi-furnished apartments priced below RM400,000 at Eco Ardence and Eco Sanctuary, as well landed homes starting from RM500,000 at Eco Botanic 2, will enable us to further capture the hearts and minds of this very important market segment.”

Chang said the prolonged movement control order (MCO) period has really made many young people realise that the quality of home and living environment matters greatly.

Mah Sing Group Bhd chief executive officer Datuk Ho Hon Sang (pic below) said as the bulk of its projects comprised units within the affordable range segment, the majority of its buyers comprised those below 35 years of age.

“For Mah Sing, 84% of our target sales for 2020 are for residential properties priced below RM700,000 with key focus in the affordable segment. We typically see about 65% of buyers who are 35 years and below, for most of the affordable projects were launched in recent years. Hence, the majority of our buyers are first time homeowners.”

Despite the challenging market environment in view of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ho said demand continues to be resilient as property remained one of the safest forms of asset class for long-term capital protection and appreciation.

“Malaysia’s population is still very young with 66% below 40 years old and as such, household formation continues to be strong. Affordably-priced properties of good quality and at strategic locations remain highly sought after.

“This is especially for first-time home buyers, which augers well for Mah Sing’s product composition.”

Sunway Property said it is seeing increasing interest from younger buyers from 25 years to 35 years in its properties that are transit-oriented and have good facilities nearby.

“For example, our developments such as the transit-oriented Sunway Avila in Wangsa Maju, the integrated and transit-oriented Sunway Velocity TWO and the youth-focused development of Sunway Grid in Sunway Iskandar has seen enthusiastic response from younger purchasers, ” it said.

Property data, analytics and solutions provider MyProperty Data chief executive officer Thor Joe Hock said the median age for residential property transactions has gradually dropped over the years.

“When we look at the over 2.5 million residential property transactions, including serviced apartments, it appears that the median age of buyers from 2000 to 2019 has remained largely unchanged at between 34 to 35 years of age.

“However, when you break it down into landed and non-landed transactions, we start to get a clearer picture. The median age for non-landed properties has fallen from 40 years in 2000 to 28 years in 2019; while the median age for landed property purchasers marginally decreased from 40 years to 37 years over the same period.”

MyProperty Data manages a property data portal called PropertyAdvisor.

Meanwhile, Lagenda Properties Bhd managing director Datuk Jimmy Doh said more than half of its buyers are below 39 years of age.

“We believe as young people start new phases in their lives, for example getting a job or starting their own families, they prefer to stay independently and have their own space, granted that the properties are within their price range.

“Over the past few years, we have been seeing an increase in buyers. Our properties are priced below RM200,000, ” he said.

MIDF Research in a recent report said the aggressive overnight policy rate (OPR) cuts have improved home buyers’ purchasing power.

“Bank Negara cut its overnight policy rate for the fourth time this year by 25 basis points (bps) to a record low of 1.75% in July due to the severe impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global economy. The aggressive OPR cuts this year are positive to the sector as it improved home buyer’s purchasing power by reducing loan installments.

“We estimate monthly installments to reduce by 14%, after 125 bps cut for RM500,000 loan with a loan repayment period of 30 years, which is quite significant in our view. Hence, we think the record-low interest rate will partly help to alleviate home buyers’ issue of securing home financing, as the record low yield has boosted the affordability of home buyers.”

MIDF Research also said it expected loan demand to recover in the second half of 2020.

Citing Bank Negara’s statistics, it said total applied loan for the purchase of property improved sequentially by 52.9% month-on-month to RM13.1bil in May, after plunging by 64.8% month-on-month in April.

“Note that total applied loan recorded steep decline in April due to the disruption to business activity following the commencement of the MCO.

“Nevertheless, total applied loan in May was lower by 61.8% year-on-year while cumulative total applied loan in the first five months of 2020 was lower by 33.6% year-on-year, indicating buying interest was subdued.”

Looking ahead, the research house expected buying interest to recover in the second half of this year, spurred by incentives introduced by the government.

Under the Short-Term Economic Recovery Plan (Penjana), which was announced in June, the government reintroduced the Home Ownership Campaign (HOC). Under the HOC, stamp duty exemption will be provided on the transfer of property and loan agreement for the purchase of home priced between RM300,000 and RM2.5mil.

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Millennials now make up over a third of the workplace and overwhelmingly value flexibility in where, when and how to work. And top talent has been increasingly clustering in dense urban areas and has been unwilling to commute to suburban office parks

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Understanding the attraction between men and women

Dr Goh Pei Hwa  from Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Science

HOW many times have we all, at some point in our lives, misinterpreted signs?


Movies like He’s Just Not That into You, which is based on Greg Behrendt’s and Liz Tuccillo’s 2004 self-help book of the same name, tells people that if a man in whom you are interested in is not making an effort to pursue you, he is “just not that into you.”

Research has long indicated that it is mostly men, who tend to misperceive friendliness as sexual interest. They overestimate the sexual interest of potential mates. Even when two people have clearly defined their relationship as platonic, more often, it is the men, who are attracted to their opposite-sex friends.

According to Dr Goh Pei Hwa from the Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, this is not always the case.

While the majority of existing findings show the abovementioned pattern of men overperceiving sexual interest, relationship researchers have demonstrated that among heterosexual couples in committed relationships, men were more likely to underperceive sexual interest from their partners.

Men from certain cultures were also less likely to overperceive sexual interest than others.

In other words, the “male over perception bias” appears to be less universal than previously assumed.

In her recent work, Dr Goh revisited the question of gender differences in sexual perception accuracy using a face-to-face, laboratory-based interaction paradigm on a sample of university students in Malaysia.

Participants consisted of 62 previously unacquainted heterosexual dyads aged 20 years on average. Each participant was randomly paired with another participant of the other sex, and each dyad engaged in a semi-structured conversation task for five minutes.

After the interaction task, participants completed measures capturing their degree of sexual interest in their interaction partner and an estimation of their partner’s sexual interest in them.

Results revealed that people’s perception of their partner’s sexual interest did not match their partner’s actual sexual interest. This indicates that people generally lacked accuracy in their perception of sexual interest.

In fact, people’s perception of sexual interest was highly in line with their own sexual interest in their interaction partner.

More importantly, no gender differences were found. This means that both men and women were equally inaccurate and equally likely to project their own sexual interest onto their estimations of their partner’s sexual interest.

“In essence, people are bad at interpreting sexual interest from strangers. Based on the research, Malaysian men do not overperceive sexual interest as past studies have suggested. Women, on the other hand, tend to underperceive sexual interest, supporting past studies,” says Goh.

The current study advances our understanding that people are generally underperceiving sexual interest in initial interactions, regardless of gender.

That is, people are either not communicating their sexual interest effectively or missing all the sexual interest cues being expressed by someone else.

Here, it translates into a lot of potentially missed opportunities. This is highly applicable to first meetings between potential partners, which begs the question: does technology further impede our ability to gauge the sexual interest of others accurately?

With dating apps, we typically already know that we are chatting with someone who finds us attractive or appealing to a certain extent.

Thus, there is no need to try to decipher whether or not someone is into us based on the interaction.

Goh concludes: “If you like someone or have some interest in a person, express it more overtly. This will invite the other person to respond according to his or her own interest in you.

“Let the other person decide if he or she is interested, not you and your potentially (or most likely) wrong perceptions”.

■ For more details, look out for the advertisement in this StarSpecial.

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US president’s move to get a cut from TikTok as an ‘extortion threat’ and ‘mafia deal’

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Expert slams US president’s move to get a cut from TikTok as an ‘extortion threat’ and ‘mafia deal’. 

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Controversial: Trump has said he would approve TikTok’s sale to Microsoft only if the US government gets a cut from the deal. — Reuters

TikTok's roller-coaster ride in the United States continued on Monday as President Donald Trump said he would approve the video-sharing app's sale to Microsoft only if the US government gets a cut, a condition that one expert called a "mafia" deal.

The president also gave Microsoft and TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, a deadline of Sept 15 to complete the deal, or the app will be banned in the US.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular media briefing in Beijing on Tuesday that the US treatment of TikTok is "outright bullying", and the US only uses a "national security risk" as an excuse to suppress Chinese tech enterprises.

"The relevant enterprises carry out business activities in the US following market principles and international rules and abiding by local laws and regulations," he said. "However, the US has set restrictions and suppressed them with unwarranted charges, which is political manipulation."

Wang said that if the wrongdoing by the US continues, then any country could take similar measures against any American enterprise on the grounds of national security.

"The US side must not open this Pandora's box, otherwise it will suffer its consequences," he said.

The increased scrutiny of TikTok culminated on Friday when Trump threatened to ban the app from operating in the US due to a "national security risk". The negotiations between the two companies were then halted.

But after a weekend phone call with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Trump reversed his stance and reportedly gave the two companies 45 days to close the deal. This was confirmed by Microsoft on Sunday, which said in a statement it "will move quickly to pursue discussions" with ByteDance and complete the talks "no later than" Sept 15.

The president added a condition to the potential purchase on Monday: Microsoft should buy TikTok outright, and the US Treasury Department should be paid because the government made the deal possible.

"It's a little bit like the landlord/tenant; without a lease the tenant has nothing, so they pay what's called 'key money', or they pay something," Trump told reporters in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Monday. "But the United States should be reimbursed or should be paid a substantial amount of money, because, without the United States, they don't have anything."

Investors in privately owned Byte-Dance valued TikTok at $50 billion, according to a Reuters report.

Kai-Fu Lee, former chairman of Google China, said the US treatment of TikTok, including "forced acquisition, plus only 45 days, plus finder's fees", is "incredible".

Lee said that China has set clear rules for internet companies that want to operate in the country, and Google had decided to exit as it didn't want to comply with Chinese laws and regulations.

"The US didn't give any parameters that TikTok could work with, and didn't provide any evidence for their claims that TikTok had caused national security risks to the US," he said.

The legal basis of Trump's requirement that some of the money from the deal go to the US Treasury was immediately questioned by experts.

"This is quite unusual; this is out of the norm," Gene Kimmelman, a former chief counsel for the US Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, told CNN.

"It's actually quite hard to understand what the president is actually talking about here.... It's not unheard of for transactions to have broader geopolitical implications between countries, but it's quite remarkable to think about some kind of money being on the table in connection with a transaction," said Kimmelman, a senior adviser to the policy group Public Knowledge.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., said Trump's "extortion threat" is a "mafia business model".

"Trump's full explanation of why the Treasury should get a 'cut' of a Microsoft/TikTok deal is, somehow, even more grotesque and shameless than I had anticipated," said Sanchez.

"As with his tariff policy, there doesn't seem to be any consideration of whether this sets a dangerous precedent for other countries to engage in similar pretextual protectionism against us, or how whimsically compelling divestment might affect international investment," he said.

Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, also warned that shutting down the app altogether would set "a dangerous precedent in which the US government can blacklist companies based on country of origin using blanket national security as justification".

The Trump administration has been scrutinizing TikTok for several months, claiming that the platform shares the data of US users with the Chinese government. The company has repeatedly denied the accusations, maintaining that all the users' information is stored in the US.

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