Wah! So lousy one ah, the tiles all come up, the paint also uneven and peel crack already, walkway so dirty and unpolished, kitchen got nothing one, even the ceiling looks like its leaking. Recently  I heard all these comments about a development that a friend just bought, he said this is even before moving in! Yup, the workmanship and finishing in Kota Kinabalu and Sabah I presumed is at the low end of the scale in Malaysia.

Hiring of illegals and untrained workers are partly to be blamed for the reasons of so many defects in development that recently received their Occupation Certificate (OC), the use of shoddy or low quality materials is just as culpable  for the current state of low quality of developments.

Despite all this, then I asked my friend are you going to regret you bought this apartment? He pause for a while, and said, “No I am not saying that, all I am saying is we pay a lot of money for this property, they should give us our moneys worth.” He went on to say, “Alam Damai only sold for RM280k to 300k back then, and their quality is pretty good, whereas this one sold for RM60k more and should have had the same quality!”

He forgot to mentioned though Alam Damai was sold during 2009, during the financial crisis, and that this particular development went on sale in 2013, during which the United States have pump trillions of cheap money into the world and that everything went up including construction cost and materials, plus labour and the booming oil price.

To get the same level of quality for two property sold at different time period, is not really possible. Why? Because LAND Cost have increase exponentially since then thanks to the Hot Property Market driven by easy credit.

Despite all this complaining, my friend is not going to sell the unit, WHY, because he made RM100k purchasing that property in a short 3 years. I am not saying developers should not do a good job but if you purchased a property that was selling for a discount according to the market trend at the time, Surian going for 420k and above, Tropicana Landmark going for RM600k and above, then you can bet the quality would not be as high as well.

Essentially, you pay peanuts, don’t expect Nutella spread.

Going forward hopefully, KK developments would get better as I have high hopes after I done some site inspection on a few developments currently in progress, like Jesselton Residence and Harrington Suites, both scoring high on construction quality and finishing, especially the latter.

propertykid.

Always Learning. Always Investing.