Dual-key property in Johor Bahru

Johor developments with a published dual-key floor plan

Eight developments where the developer publishes the dual-key layout with a code and a built-up area. These are the ones you can actually check before you pay a booking fee.

Leasehold

Iskandar Puteri · Johor

Verte Medini Residence

Medini · 614–935 sq ft · 99-year strata lease, not freehold

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Freehold

Taman Sentosa · Johor

Skyline One Sentosa

Freehold · 430-968 sq ft · RM507,000-RM1,128,000 · completion Mar 2031

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Freehold

Senibong Cove · Johor

Hillview @ Senibong Cove

Freehold · 598–1,349 sq ft · RM452k–RM1.19m

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Freehold

Johor Bahru · Johor

Causewayz Square @ JBCC

Freehold · 366–850 sq ft · 600m to CIQ

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Tenure not published

Tebrau · Johor

Monterra Johor Bahru

From RM382,200 · 579–903 sq ft · Foreigners cannot buy

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Freehold

Johor Bahru · Johor

Aethera Residences

Freehold · 786 units · 650–2,594 sq ft · ~400m to RTS

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• Verte Medini Residence · Medini, Iskandar PuteriType A 935 sq ft (3 rooms) · Type B 614 sq ft (2 rooms)2 of 5 published layouts · leasehold
• Skyline One Sentosa · Taman Sentosa, Johor BahruType E 600 sq ft (2 bed) · Type F 968 sq ft (3 bed)2 of 6 layouts · freehold
• Hillview @ Senibong Cove · Senibong Cove, MasaiD1 1,349 sq ft · D2 1,288 sq ft · D2a 1,288 sq ft3 of 12 layouts · the largest plans in Tower A
• Causewayz Square @ JBCC · Tanjung Puteri, Johor BahruType B 592 sq ft (Axis) · F1 and F2 850 sq ft, 3 bed (Brixton & Dover)3 of 9 layouts · freehold
• Monterra Johor Bahru · Tebrau, Johor BahruType C 792 sq ft (2 bed) · Type D 903 sq ft (3 bed)2 of 4 layouts · entry price RM382,200
• Summer Suites Johor Bahru · Bukit Meldrum, Johor BahruType A 912 sq ft, 3 bed 3 bath — 136 units, 18% of the buildingType C 599 sq ft is a dual studio, not a dual key
• Aethera Residences · IIBD, Johor Bahru city centreType D 1,033 sq ft, 3 bed 2 bath, two entrances1 of 7 priced layouts · freehold
• The M Macrolink Medini · Medini, Iskandar PuteriType H 1,152 sq ft, 3 bed 3 bath1 of 11 layouts · completed 2020, resale only

Developments that say dual-key without publishing the layout

The developer says dual-key. The floor plan schedule, the areas, or both are missing. These are worth looking at — but get the specific layout confirmed in writing, on your stack, before the booking fee.

• CTC SkyOne @ Bukit Chagar · Bukit Chagar, Johor BahruCTC states dual-key and triple-key throughout, two- to four-bedroomNo built-ups, no floor plans, no price list published
• Gen Sphere @ JBCC · Johor Bahru city centreAll five layouts, 459–755 sq ft, are dual-key ready by adding a door or partitionDual-key ready, not dual-key as built · 100% taken up on 7 May 2026
• Calia Residences by PGB · Danga Bay, Johor BahruType D 984 sq ft, 3 bed 3 bath, described by the developer as dual-keyNot tagged dual-key on the plan itself — get your stack confirmed in writing
• R&F Princess Cove Phase 2 — Seine Region · Tanjung Puteri, Johor BahruR&F files dual-key as one of seven layout headingsNo plan codes and no areas published for the dual-key group · completed 2024
• The Address @ Maxim Pelangi · Pelangi, Johor BahruDual-key offered on the two-bedroom typesizes reported at 450 – 875 sq ft · 3 blocks, 2,743 units · targeted July 2030

One parcel, whatever the marketing calls it

Start with the definition that decides everything else. Section 4 of the Strata Titles Act 1985 defines a parcel as one of the individual units in a subdivided building which, except for an accessory parcel, is held under a separate strata title. The Strata Management Act 2013 uses the same test. Two lockable sections behind one strata title is one parcel. Not two.

Nothing prevented the developer from drawing two parcels on the proposed strata plan. Section 6(1) of the Act permits subdivision into parcels, section 8A(6) requires the proposed strata plan to show all of them, and section 10(1)(h) requires the Director to be satisfied that the proposed share units are equitable. What makes a unit dual-key is precisely and only that the developer chose to draw one parcel — two lettable spaces, one parcel’s worth of obligations. That is the product. It is not an accident, and it is not a loophole either.

Share units, and why the maintenance bill does not halve

Share units are calculated under the formula in the First Schedule to the Strata Management Act 2013, applied through section 8: the parcel’s area multiplied by a weightage for parcel type and a weightage for the overall floor, plus any accessory parcel at its own weightage. The input is the area of the parcel. There is no mechanism anywhere in the Act to split one parcel’s share units between two occupied halves.

Maintenance charges follow directly. Sections 25(3), 52(2), 59(2)(a) and 60(3)(b) all levy charges in proportion to share units. Section 60(3)(b) lets a management corporation set different rates only for parcels used for significantly different purposes, and a dual-key residential parcel is not a different purpose from a non-dual-key residential parcel — so a dual-key surcharge would be hard to sustain, and equally, you get no discount for the fact that two households are sharing one bill. In absolute ringgit a dual-key is cheaper than owning two separate parcels. Per square foot it is not cheaper at all, because a dual-key is physically the larger unit. And it normally carries one accessory car park bay for two households.

One vote

Paragraph 21(1) of the Second Schedule to the Act gives each proprietor one vote in respect of each parcel on a show of hands, and on a poll a number of votes corresponding to the share units attached to that parcel. Applied to the management corporation by section 56(2) and to the joint management body by section 21(2). Two households, one parcel, one vote — and no vote at all if the charges are in arrears on the seventh day before the meeting. If you are buying into a building where dual-keys are a large share of the stock, that is worth knowing: the people living there outnumber the people who can vote on the by-laws that govern them.

What the management can and cannot do about your two tenancies

The good news first. Section 70(5)(a) of the Strata Management Act 2013 says no additional by-law shall be capable of operating to prohibit or restrict the transfer, lease or charge of, or any other dealing with, any parcel. A tenancy is a dealing. A by-law that says “parcels shall not be let” is void, and a by-law that says “parcels shall not be let in parts” is on very thin ice for the same reason.

Now the part that matters more. Section 70(2) lets a management corporation make additional by-laws by special resolution on listed matters, including safety and security measures, parking, and the behaviour of occupants, with fines up to RM200 and filing with the Commissioner of Buildings within 30 days. A by-law drafted as a security measure — each parcel is issued a maximum of two access cards, every occupant must be registered, visitors must be signed in — never uses the word lease, does not offend section 70(5), and quietly destroys the economics of letting two separate households from one parcel. That is the concrete risk, and it is the one almost nobody raises at the sales gallery.

There is a second line of attack. By-law 8(9) of the prescribed by-laws in the Third Schedule to the Strata Management (Maintenance and Management) Regulations 2015 requires a proprietor not to use, or permit the use of, his parcel contrary to the terms of use shown in the plan approved by the relevant authority. If the approved building plan for your unit shows one dwelling unit, running two unrelated tenancies out of it is arguable. If the approved plan itself shows a dual-key with two lockable sub-units, that argument is much weaker. This is why the single most useful document you can ask a developer for is the approved building plan for your specific layout — not the marketing floor plan.

One structural point about timing. During the joint management body period, by-laws are made under section 32, which contains no equivalent of the section 70(5) protection. Your position is at its weakest in the years immediately after handover, which is exactly when a new building is deciding what kind of building it wants to be.

Short-stay is a separate question, and it is settled

In Innab Salil & Ors v Verve Suites Mont’ Kiara Management Corporation the Federal Court held on 5 October 2020 that a house rule prohibiting short-term rentals does not violate section 70(5)(a), because short-stay arrangements are licences rather than dealings in land. The court described the Strata Management Act as social legislation and said that where two interpretations are possible, the one favouring the community over the individual is preferred. It also held that a commercial land category does not exempt a development from section 70. So if your dual-key numbers only work on nightly rates, read the by-laws actually filed with the Commissioner of Buildings for that development before you sign. I could find no Johor state or MBJB short-term rental guideline of any kind, so the by-laws are the whole of the law for you.

One electricity account, one water meter, two households

TNB’s own landlord and tenant material states that only one Registered User can be contractually tied to TNB for a premises at any one time. Under the Licensee Supply Regulations 1990, the licensee provides and fixes such meters as it considers necessary, and any additional meter installed at a consumer’s request is charged to the consumer. On the water side, the Water Services Industry (Water Reticulation and Plumbing) Rules 2014, in force since 1 February 2014 across the Peninsula, make the parcel the unit of metering — and a dual-key is one parcel. Ranhill SAJ’s own application process asks for the sale and purchase agreement, the certificate of completion and compliance and a copy of the title, which are inherently one per parcel.

I want to be precise about the strength of this: I could not find a TNB or Energy Commission document that says in terms “a dual-key parcel cannot have two accounts”. The conclusion above is built from the one-Registered-User rule, the metering regulation and the parcel-based water rules. Ask your developer to confirm it in writing for your building rather than taking it from a page.

What one meter costs you

Peninsular Malaysia’s restructured domestic tariff has been in force since 1 July 2025. The RM10 monthly retail charge is waived only up to 600 kWh. The energy efficiency incentive applies only to domestic accounts at or below 1,000 kWh a month. And above 1,500 kWh the energy charge steps from 27.03 to 37.03 sen per kWh — on all the units consumed, not just the excess above the threshold. Two households on one account walk through all three of those lines that a single household would never reach. The July 2025 restructuring reduced the penalty. It did not remove it.

Water is proportionally worse and almost nobody mentions it. Ranhill SAJ’s domestic tariff runs at RM1.05 per cubic metre for the first 20 m³, RM2.35 from 21 to 35 m³, and RM3.50 above 35 m³. That is a 124% jump at the first step and 233% at the second. One family stays inside the cheap block. Two do not.

Charging the tenant, and the trap on the other side

Reselling electricity is not prohibited outright. Section 31 of the Electricity Supply Act 1990 contemplates resale and empowers the Commission to fix maximum resale prices; section 31(4) says that where electricity is resold above a fixed maximum, the excess is recoverable by the person it was sold to. I could not find a gazetted order actually fixing those maximum prices, so do not let anyone tell you a mark-up is automatically illegal — but do not treat it as risk-free either, because supplying electricity to another person without a licence engages section 9(1)(b), penalised under section 37(5). Water is more comfortable ground: the Water Services Industry Act 2006 has no equivalent resale provision, and section 21(1) expressly contemplates supply to your own tenants and occupiers within your premises.

The trap that catches people is category, not price. Regulation 11(5) of the Licensee Supply Regulations 1990 allows TNB to make retrospective adjustments of up to three months where a consumer converts from domestic to business use, and regulation 11(7) allows disconnection on 14 days’ notice if the consumer refuses a new agreement. TNB defines a domestic consumer as one occupying a private dwelling not used as a hotel, boarding house, or for any form of business. Run one half of a dual-key as short-stay accommodation and you have exposed the whole parcel, including the half you live in, to three months of backbilling at business rates.

One small thing worth knowing before you promise a tenant anything: Unifi’s home terms allow one service per installation address, more only at TM’s discretion. A dual-key is one installation address. Plan on sharing one line with separate networks, or on a different operator or 5G service for the second half.

What actually changes your loan — and what does not

I went looking for a Malaysian bank policy, a Bank Negara statement, a Board of Valuers standard or a JPPH guideline that treats dual-key differently. There is none. The Malaysian Valuation Standards are method-level, not layout-level. NAPIC does not publish dual-key as a transaction category. So when someone tells you banks lend less on dual-key, ask them for the source, and when someone tells you the opposite, ask them too.

What is documented is the variable that genuinely moves the number in Johor Bahru, and it is the one dual-key buyers keep walking past: title category. Most dual-key stock here — Causewayz Square, Summer Suites, Hillview @ Senibong Cove, CTC SkyOne, R&F Princess Cove Phase 2 — sits on commercial land as serviced apartments. Commercial-titled residences typically finance at 80% to 85% loan-to-value against roughly 90% for residential title, and they carry commercial assessment rates and commercial utility minimums for as long as you own them. Serviced apartments and SoHo fall inside the Housing Development Act; SoVo and SoFo do not, which means no standard statutory sale and purchase agreement and no Housing Tribunal.

Bank Negara’s 70% loan-to-value cap on a borrower’s third house financing facility was announced on 3 November 2010 with immediate effect and has never been publicly withdrawn. It counts financing facilities, which is why the sensible reading is that a dual-key — one title, one sale and purchase agreement, one loan — counts as one. No published source addresses dual-key expressly, so treat that as reasoning rather than as a rule, and get your banker to put it in writing. The same caution applies to tenure: Bank Negara’s 5 July 2013 measure caps property financing at 35 years, and that applies to residential and non-residential property alike, so a commercial-titled dual-key is inside it. The often-quoted “or age 70” ceiling is individual bank credit policy, not a Bank Negara rule.

The valuation shortfall, which is where thin comparables actually hurt

Valuers work from comparables. When a layout is rare in its building and untracked in the national data, there is less to compare against, and a cautious valuation is the natural result. The arithmetic is unforgiving. On a RM520,000 purchase valued at RM500,000 with 90% financing, the bank lends RM450,000, and you fund the RM52,000 deposit plus the RM20,000 gap — RM72,000 cash instead of RM52,000. That is the mechanism to ask your banker about before you pay a booking fee on a dual-key, not a mythical dual-key haircut.

The buyer pool is narrower, and nobody publishes the numbers

There is no Malaysian data on dual-key resale performance. NAPIC does not track the category, no research house publishes a sub-series, and the claims circulating about dual-key holding value better all trace back to agency or developer marketing with nothing behind them. The one registered Malaysian valuation firm I found writing on the subject, back in 2018, said the opposite: higher entry cost, appeal limited to a handful of buyers, and the two halves cannot be sold separately.

The structural argument for dual-key is real and worth stating properly. Two tenancies from one parcel means a single vacancy costs you half your rent rather than all of it, and you carry one set of holding costs against two income streams. The two Malaysian rent comparisons I could find suggest a gross rent uplift in the region of 15% to 25% against a conventional unit of similar floor area — but neither comparison adjusts for purchase price, so neither establishes a yield advantage. I am not going to convert them into a yield figure for you.

The market backdrop is the part to weigh most heavily. NAPIC’s Q1 2026 snapshot puts Johor at 9,972 unsold completed serviced apartments, the highest of any state, up from around 9,018 in Q3 2025. Nationally, 58.5% of completed unsold serviced apartments are priced between RM500,001 and RM1 million — the exact band most Johor Bahru dual-keys sit in. Johor also had the most new residential launches of any state in Q1 2026 at 2,693 units, and the national housing loan approval rate over the first four months of 2026 was 39.2%, down from 41% in 2025. When you come to sell, you are selling a layout with no published comparables, in the most crowded price band, in the state with the deepest completed overhang, to buyers who are being approved for credit less often than they were two years ago. Price that in.

You cannot split a dual-key into two titles later

Division of a parcel is theoretically available under Part V of the Strata Titles Act 1985, sections 24 to 33A. Section 25(1) lets a parcel proprietor divide his parcel into two or more new parcels with the Director’s approval. Section 26(1) then says the total share units of all the new parcels must equal the share units of the divided parcel — you are re-slicing the same cake, never getting a bigger one.

The provision that kills it in practice is section 27(f): where a division is proposed, each new parcel must have adequate means of access not passing through another parcel. The standard dual-key has one door from the common corridor into a shared foyer with two internal doors off it. Give the foyer to parcel A and parcel B’s only access runs through parcel A, which fails section 27(f) outright. Convert the foyer to common property instead and you trigger sections 25(3) and 27(da): the management corporation must consent in writing to adopting a private lobby and absorbing an extra unit’s load on lifts, refuse, water and security — for zero additional share units and therefore zero additional maintenance income. No corporation has a rational reason to agree. On top of that, section 27(d) requires the written consent of every chargee, lessee and lienholder, which means your bank, and section 27(b) requires no contravention of any written law, which means fresh fire and building compliance for two independent dwellings.

Treat a dual-key as permanently one title. If someone sells you the idea that you can subdivide it later and sell the halves separately, they have not read section 27.

The RM1 million floor removes most of this page

Johor’s published minimum purchase price for a foreign interest is RM1,000,000, and state consent under section 433B of the National Land Code is required on top. “Foreign interest” is broad: it catches non-citizens, Malaysian permanent residents, foreign companies, and Malaysian companies where those parties hold more than half the voting rights. The rule is applied unit by unit, not project by project.

Run that across this page and most of the dual-key stock disappears. Monterra’s largest published layout does not come close. Calia’s entire permit price band stops at RM815,296, which means a foreign buyer cannot buy a single unit in the building. Gen Sphere’s band reached RM1,120,000, so the largest units qualified — but the developer announced 100% take-up on 7 May 2026, so there is no developer stock left. The dual-key layouts with a realistic path over the floor are the large ones: Hillview @ Senibong Cove’s D1 at 1,349 sq ft, in a project whose approved permit range runs to RM1,191,000; Skyline One Sentosa’s Type F at 968 sq ft, the largest layout in a project permitted to RM1,128,000; Causewayz Square’s F1 and F2 at 850 sq ft; and Aethera’s Type D at 1,033 sq ft, inside a band that runs from RM996,200 to RM4,288,000. In every case it is the specific unit that has to clear RM1,000,000, not the layout.

Then price the friction. Johor’s state approval fee rose from 2% or RM20,000 to 3% of the stamped purchase price or RM30,000, whichever is higher, from 1 July 2025, under Pekeliling Pengarah Tanah dan Galian Johor Bil. 3 Tahun 2025 dated 13 June 2025. Two things about that fee matter specifically to dual-key buyers. First, dual-key stock is almost always a serviced residence, and for a serviced residence transacted below RM1 million the minimum is not RM30,000 but RM50,000 — the two minimums split at exactly RM1,000,000, above which the 3% is larger than either. Second, there is a transitional rule: the old scale, 2% or RM20,000 under PTG Circular 02/2014, still governs where the sale and purchase agreement had already been signed and stamped and the complete application reached the land office on or before 29 August 2025. Consent applications carry a separate RM2,000 per title fee, extensions RM2,000 and appeals RM3,000. And from 1 January 2026 a flat 8% stamp duty applies to a non-citizen individual or foreign company acquiring residential property, under the new item 32(ab) inserted into the First Schedule to the Stamp Act 1949 by the Finance Act 2025, charged on the consideration or the market value, whichever is greater. Malaysian permanent residents fall outside the 8% but remain inside the state consent regime. Two of the Medini projects on this page — The M Macrolink Medini and Verte Medini Residence — have historically been treated as exempt from the RM1 million floor under the Iskandar regional framework, but I could not verify the current position from any government source, so get that confirmed in writing before you rely on it.

Six things to get in writing on a dual-key

Frequently asked questions

Other Johor Bahru topics worth reading next

Published 2026-08-05 · Last verified 2026-08-05 against developer floor plans and layout schedules, the Strata Titles Act 1985, the Strata Management Act 2013 and its 2015 regulations, TNB and Ranhill SAJ published tariffs, Bank Negara Malaysia policy statements, NAPIC’s Q1 2026 property market snapshot, Pekeliling PTG Johor Bil. 3 Tahun 2025 and the Finance Act 2025. Layouts, availability and pricing are set by developers and change without notice. This page is marketing information and general commentary, not legal or financial advice, and not an offer or a contract.