Setia Sky 88 @ JB City Centre

Only above RM1,000,000, which rules out most of the building. Johor’s minimum purchase price for a foreign acquirer is RM1 million for strata property, and the Johor land office applies that floor to sub-sales exactly as it applies to purchases from a developer. Setia Sky 88’s asking range on 4 August 2026 ran from RM480,000 to RM1.89 million, and only a handful of listings at the very top clear RM1 million.

So in practice a Singaporean or other foreign buyer is choosing from a narrow band of large units — the 1,636 sq ft type asking around RM1.89 million, and whatever else happens to be listed above the threshold on the day. Everything at RM480,000 to RM900,000, which is the bulk of the building, is simply unavailable. There is no MM2H exception that overrides the state floor, and there is no exemption on this project that I have been able to verify.

On top of the price you should budget for the Johor state levy on foreign acquisition: since 1 July 2025 that is 3% of the transacted or JPPH value, with a RM30,000 minimum, for both residential and commercial categories on sub-sale. One tier on that scale is easy to miss and it lands squarely on this building: where the property is a serviced residence transacted below RM1 million, the minimum is RM50,000, not RM30,000. Setia Sky 88 is a serviced apartment with asking prices from RM480,000 to RM1.89 million, so it straddles the line — under RM1,000,000 the RM50,000 floor governs, and at or above it the 3% is larger than either floor anyway. Add the 8% stamp duty that applies to non-citizen individuals and foreign companies acquiring residential property from 1 January 2026 — and a serviced apartment falls squarely inside the Stamp Act’s definition of residential property. On a RM1.05 million unit that is roughly RM84,000 in stamp duty plus around RM31,500 in state levy before legal fees.

Add the RM2,000 consent application fee per title, and remember state consent under section 433B of the National Land Code is mandatory and takes 2-3 weeks to 3 months depending on whether a JPPH valuation is required. One more thing worth checking with the land office: PTG Johor’s own definition of foreign interest includes Malaysian permanent residents, which is stricter than the federal position and stricter than the stamp duty rules.

The best available transacted figure is a median of RM845 per square foot, or RM694,000 per unit, across 18 recorded sales between February 2025 and January 2026, from Brickz transaction data. That is the number I would work from.

There is a conflict here that I am not going to bury. EdgeProp’s record for this development shows a median of RM1,307 psf, ranging RM1,188-1,493 psf over 48 months. The two cannot both describe the same population — and the explanation appears to be that EdgeProp’s record covers only about 250 units, which is roughly The Altus alone rather than all three towers. EdgeProp also reports a historical high of RM3,868 psf on a 506 sq ft unit, which works out at RM1.96 million for a studio. That is implausible for this building and suggests bulk transactions recorded against a single unit area, which would inflate the median.

My reading: Brickz’s RM845 psf is the more plausible market-wide number, EdgeProp’s is likely a tower-specific or distorted subset. I cite both because a buyer who has seen the RM1,307 figure elsewhere deserves to know where it comes from rather than be told a different number with no explanation.

Neither source would give me a transaction-level table — date, size, price per sale. If you are serious about a specific size band, that table is what you actually need, and it is the first thing I pull before advising anyone to make an offer here.

Below, in nominal ringgit, and considerably further below in real terms. This is documented, not inferred.

The Edge reported the September 2012 launch prices directly: RM500,000 for a 517 sq ft one-bedroom, which is RM967 psf, and RM1,200,000 for a 1,389 sq ft three-bedroom, which is RM864 psf. Against a transacted median of RM845 psf in 2025-26, the building is roughly 2-13% below its launch psf after about fourteen years.

But the average hides the important part, because the decline is size-dependent. Small units have held or slightly improved: around 505 sq ft, asking prices of RM520,000-600,000 work out at RM1,030-1,188 psf, against a launch benchmark of RM967. Large units have not: a 1,140 sq ft unit asking RM650,000 is RM570 psf, and a 1,289 sq ft unit asking RM840,000 is RM652 psf, both roughly 25-34% below the RM864 psf launch benchmark for large layouts.

A corroborating datapoint: in July 2022, developer stock was still being marketed in Singapore from around S$155,000 for a one-bedroom — meaning the developer’s own entry quantum had barely moved ten years after launch. If you are buying here, understand you are buying a building whose large layouts have not appreciated. That is a real opportunity if you want maximum floor area per ringgit for own stay. It is a poor thesis if you are buying for capital gain.

Three towers — The Altus at 60 storeys and 220 metres, SORA at 55 storeys, NUBE at 55 storeys — all completed in 2017, per the international tall-building register, which is the most reliable source available now that the developer has retired the project page.

Total units: I put it at about 838, and I want to be clear that this is a reconciled figure rather than a sourced one. It comes from adding the 588 units that SORA and NUBE launched with in September 2012 to the roughly 250 units attributed to The Altus. That reconciliation is independently supported by a third-party building record which also gives 838. A figure of 872 circulates but is a 2013 pre-construction estimate; 488 appears on one portal as apparent boilerplate.

Two circulating claims are demonstrably wrong. It is not three towers of 55 storeys — that was reported in 2013, before The Altus was redesigned taller. And it is not one 70-storey tower plus two 55-storey towers; that comes from a listing page which on the same screen says the project has two blocks and estimates completion in Q4 2016.

One naming trap: the international register calls The Altus “Tower A”, but Johor Bahru agents and residents consistently refer to it as Tower C. When someone quotes you a unit in “Tower C, level 4x”, ask which of the three named towers they mean. Do not assume the letter maps to the name.

Around RM0.47 to RM0.48 per square foot per month, which is roughly RM470-480 on a 1,000 sq ft unit. The evidence: an agent listing in September 2024 for a 721 sq ft unit in Tower C quotes RM340 a month, which works out to RM0.472 psf; a developer-appointed marketer quoted RM0.48 psf in 2021.

Ignore the RM0.40 psf figure you will see quoted widely. It traces to launch-era marketing on a page that also says completion was expected in 2014 and that the project has two blocks. It is copied verbatim by at least one other site. It is stale.

The sinking fund is not separately verified. One reference to “maintenance fee with sinking fund RM337.20” suggests the quoted psf rate is inclusive rather than on top, but I could not confirm that against an invoice or an AGM document.

I could not verify who manages the building. No JMB or MC record was found in the public register. Strata titles appear to have been issued, which implies a management corporation rather than a joint management body, but that is inference. The managing agent’s name is not published anywhere I could reach. Before you make an offer, ask the seller for the last two years of maintenance invoices, the most recent AGM minutes and the current audited accounts. On a nine-year-old building, the state of the sinking fund tells you more about your next ten years of ownership than the asking price does.

Mixed, and the pattern in the complaints is more useful than any single review. The Google rating is 4.3 out of 5 from 312 reviews, which sounds healthy until you notice that 22 of them are one-star — about 7%, a visible negative tail for a building of this class.

The clearest recurring theme is facility upkeep. A July 2025 review, itself five stars, notes the sauna and steam room under maintenance with the dance, gourmet and leisure rooms locked. A March 2025 review describes booking and paying for the BBQ pit only to find the area under renovation, ongoing for almost four months, and calls the amenities “empty and rundown”. A July 2024 review complains about smell from drains on the sky pool level. Against that, the Level 9 pool is praised repeatedly.

The second recurring theme is low water pressure, mentioned in reviews across 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Whether that is a building riser problem or unit-level plumbing is undetermined from public sources, and it is worth testing yourself during a viewing — run the shower on a high floor at a peak hour.

Two genuinely positive findings. First, no lift breakdown or waiting-time complaints turned up at all, which is notable for a 55 to 60 storey block with six lifts. The lift-related complaints are all about access control — separate cards for different towers and no direct card access from the carpark to your floor. Second, no maintenance-fee dispute, arrears crisis or AGM conflict appears in any public source. Several reviewers also observe that the building feels quiet and under-occupied — “an echo in the common areas”, “a mostly empty carpark”. Take that as you find it: pleasant for an owner-occupier, less encouraging for rental depth.

Asking rents on 4 August 2026 ran from about RM2,200 for 517 sq ft to RM3,800 for 1,244 sq ft, with the wider building band quoted as RM1,150 to RM7,500. The middle of the market: 602 sq ft at RM2,400-2,500, 678 sq ft at RM2,800, 700-775 sq ft at RM2,300-2,700, 800-872 sq ft at RM2,600-2,900, 958 sq ft at RM2,600-3,200.

These are asking rents, not transacted rents. No transacted rental data exists publicly for this building — EdgeProp reports its rental median and yield as unavailable. So any yield calculated from them is an upper bound.

On that basis, asking rent divided by asking price gives a gross yield of roughly 3.5% to 5.4%, clustering around 4.5-5%. Now take the deductions. Maintenance at RM0.47 psf consumes about 15% of gross rent on a 1,000 sq ft unit before you touch anything else. Then the sinking fund, assessment, quit rent, fire insurance, agency commission on each new tenancy, and vacancy between tenants — which in a building with 118 units advertised for rent at once is not a theoretical risk. A realistic net yield here is 2.5% to 3.5%.

One structural point worth understanding: yield is thinnest at the large-unit end, which is also where the discount to launch price is deepest. The large layouts are cheap per square foot because they are hard to rent at a proportionate rent. If you are buying purely for yield, the small units make more arithmetic sense; if you are buying for own stay, the large ones are where the value is.

Operationally yes, and many owners already do — but the legal position is not settled and the commercial position is crowded.

The building is saturated with short-stay operations. I identified a hard floor of about 30 distinct listings — twelve Airbnb room IDs and at least eighteen named properties on Booking, Agoda and Trip.com — run by at least nine professional operator brands, each typically running several units. The true count is plausibly in the low hundreds. Operators run branded self-check-in businesses here at scale using resident access cards, so short-stay is clearly tolerated in practice.

I found no house rule or by-law prohibiting it, in English, Malay or Chinese. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the regulatory picture is unresolved: as at early 2026 there is no national law banning short-term rental, the draft federal guidelines remain pre-Cabinet and unenforceable, and no Johor or MBJB-specific rule is verifiable.

The real risk is not the council. It is the management corporation. In Innab Salil v Verve Suites Mont’ Kiara Management Corporation, the Federal Court held that a management corporation may prohibit short-term rental through its house rules. Whether this one has done so, I could not determine, and whether it might at a future general meeting is impossible to predict. If your entire investment case rests on nightly rates, get the current house rules in writing from the management office before you sign — not from the agent, and not from the seller.

The Johor-Singapore CIQ at Bangunan Sultan Iskandar is 1.6 km in a straight line, and about 2.5 km by road to the departure entrance. Woodlands Checkpoint on the Singapore side is 3.81 km straight line, 5.2 km by road. These are my own calculations from the site coordinate rather than a developer figure, because there is no current developer material for this building.

RTS Link Bukit Chagar station is 1.35 km straight line and about 3.3 km by road. The running line does not pass the site. What is close is the Wadi Hana depot — the RTS Link’s Malaysian maintenance facility — roughly 800 metres due south. A depot is not a station, and it is worth walking the area to see what that proximity means in practice.

Everything else, straight line: Plaza Pelangi 0.55 km, KSL City Mall 0.81 km, KOMTAR JBCC 1.65 km, JB Sentral 1.76 km, JB City Square 1.90 km, Hospital Sultanah Aminah 2.58 km, Senai International Airport 20.3 km.

Note that road distances here run roughly double the straight-line figures, because Johor Bahru city centre is a one-way system and there is no direct route from Wadi Hana to most of these. On the RTS opening date, reported expectations range between December 2026 and the first quarter of 2027; that timing is not settled, and I would not price a purchase on a specific month.

Yes, and yes. On the national property data centre’s most recent published quarter — Q1 2026 — Johor held 9,972 unsold completed serviced apartment units, by a wide margin the largest of any state, against Kuala Lumpur’s 4,181 and Selangor’s 2,407. That is roughly 51.8% of the entire national serviced-apartment overhang sitting in one state. Johor also held 3,852 unsold completed residential units, second nationally.

The pipeline makes it heavier, not lighter. Reading the same Q1 2026 data, CIMB Research counts an existing stock of 108,863 serviced apartment units with an incoming supply of 41,832 units to 2030 and a further 18,712 planned to 2031. In Q1 2026 Johor led the country in new residential launches with 2,693 units, against a national sales rate of just 11.5%.

For a Setia Sky 88 owner this shows up in two ways. When you sell, your buyer has 108 other units in this building alone to choose from, plus a city full of newer stock. When you let, you compete with 118 units advertised for rent here at the same time. That is precisely why large layouts here trade 25-34% below their 2012 launch psf — it is a supply outcome, not a defect in the building.

The counterweight: new launches at the Bukit Chagar and CIQ node are pricing at around RM1,500 psf, roughly double what this building transacts at. Consultants have publicly flagged 2027-2029 as the pressure years, when a large volume of projects completes just after the RTS and JS-SEZ narrative has already been priced in. If you buy at RM600-850 psf in a completed freehold building with facilities in place, you are entering well below replacement narrative pricing. That is the honest case for buying here — not appreciation, but entry price.

A completed building that the developer has de-listed leaves gaps, and I would rather list them than paper over them.

Land title category. One portal’s structured data field records this as residential land title, which would be unusual — most Johor serviced apartments sit on commercial title, with the higher assessment and utility rates that come with it. If it really is residential title, that is a meaningful advantage over most of its competitors. It rests on a portal field, not a land office search. Get a title search before you rely on it.

The developing subsidiary and its company registration number. One 2013 trade article names an entity that is normally associated with Setia Alam rather than Johor, so I have not printed it.

Certificate of completion dates and per-tower vacant possession dates. Sources give 2016, 2017 and 2018; the building register’s 2017 is the best available. Construction was phased, so handover almost certainly was too.

Also unverified: whether the body is a management corporation or a joint management body and who the managing agent is; the sinking fund as a separate rate; any AGM, arrears or fee-increase history; whether any short-term-rental house rule exists; whether the Stellar 88 cafe ever opened; the current occupancy rate and the owner-occupier versus investor split. I get several of these from the management office and from a title search when a client is genuinely at the offer stage. Message me and I will tell you which ones I can have back within a week.