Southkey NADI Residences

No. Not one unit, not on any floor, not with any package.

Johor requires a non-citizen to pay at least RM1,000,000 for strata property and to obtain state consent on top of that. The published price range at NADI runs from around RM422,000 to RM694,000. Every layout in the building sits below the floor, so the state consent application would not even get off the ground.

This is worth stating plainly because agents sometimes imply that the levy, the stamp duty or an MM2H visa somehow opens the door. They do not. The Johor foreign buyer levy (3% of price or RM30,000, whichever is higher, since 1 July 2025 — and note that on a serviced residence transacted below RM1 million, which is the only band NADI has, the state minimum is RM50,000, not RM30,000) and the flat 8% stamp duty on non-citizens (since 1 January 2026) are costs you pay after you clear the price floor — they are not a substitute for clearing it.

Both dates are in public circulation and I am not going to pick one for you without the document. iProperty and PropertyGuru both list completion in 2027. At least one agent microsite for the same project states 2029. Southkey City’s own project page states no completion date at all.

The date that binds anyone is the one in the sale and purchase agreement, which for a HDA project is 36 months from the date of the agreement for a strata unit. That is the number to read, and it is on paper, not on a website. Ask me for the current S&P and I will send the schedule as issued.

A two-year gap between two published dates is not a rounding error. It changes your rental start date, your interest-during-construction, and whether the RTS Link is running before or after you get your keys.

Southkey City has not published the lease expiry year, and I will not guess it. What I can tell you is why it matters more here than most buyers assume.

Malaysian banks size the loan tenure against the residue of the lease, not just against your age. Once the balance drops toward 70 years, some lenders start trimming tenure and margin; below 60 the pool of willing banks narrows further. That effect lands on the person you eventually sell to, which means it lands on your price.

The fix is cheap and takes days: a land title search on the parent lot tells you the exact expiry date. I order one for clients before the booking fee. Message me and I will arrange it.

It is a running cost, not a one-off, and it shows up in three places: local council assessment, the water tariff and the electricity tariff, all of which are typically set higher for commercial-titled premises than for residential ones.

The second effect is financing. Many Malaysian banks apply a lower margin of advance to commercial-titled serviced apartments than to residential-titled condominiums, so the same headline price can require a bigger cash deposit from you.

None of this makes a commercial title bad — most new serviced apartments in Johor Bahru sit on one. It makes it a number you need in the comparison, and buyers routinely leave it out when they compare a serviced apartment instalment against a residential condo instalment.

If you are eligible, the discount takes the entry price to RM358,700 from around RM422,000. On a 649 sq ft unit that is a meaningful reduction in both deposit and instalment, and for an own-stay first home it is usually worth taking.

The consideration is the exit. A Bumi lot generally has to be transferred to another Bumi purchaser unless the state agrees to release the condition, and that application takes time and is not automatic. Your resale market is therefore a subset of the market, permanently, unless and until the release is granted.

My rule of thumb: take the discount if you intend to live there. Think harder about it if the plan is to flip in five years, because the discount you banked at the front can be handed back at the back in a slower sale.

The oversupply is real and I will quote it precisely rather than softly. NAPIC’s Q1 2026 data puts Johor at 9,972 completed unsold serviced apartment units — the heaviest overhang of any state, ahead of Kuala Lumpur at 4,181 and Selangor at 2,407. Nationally there were 19,263 completed unsold serviced apartments worth RM16.52 billion, and 58.5% of that stock sits in the RM500,001 to RM1 million band.

Now put NADI against that. Its B and C series land squarely inside the RM500,001 to RM1 million band where the national overhang is thickest. That is the honest risk on this project and no amount of masterplan rendering changes it.

What is different here is density and completeness. 395 units in a precinct that already has its mall, hospital and campus trading is a very different exposure from a 3,000-unit tower launched next to an empty field. Overhang statistics are an average; you are buying one specific building, and the specifics are what I would spend your time on.

Southkey City publishes a headline of from RM358,700 after the 15% Bumiputera discount, which implies roughly RM422,000 before it. Listing portals show a range of about RM434,000 to RM694,000. The developer has not published a maintenance rate or a car park allocation anywhere public.

I am not going to average the portal numbers into a figure that looks authoritative and is not. Pricing at NADI moves by floor and by stack, and the difference between a low-floor A2c and a high-floor C1 is far wider than any single range implies.

Message me and I will pull the live price list, the current rebate package and the maintenance rate direct from Southkey City for the specific layout you are looking at.

The 649 sq ft A series, and the reason is walking distance rather than design. The tenants in this precinct are staff at the mall, at Columbia Asia and at the university college, plus office workers in the Southkey shop-office blocks. Most of them are single or a couple, and most of them want a one-bedroom they can walk to work from.

The trade-off is that six of the eight plan variants in the building are that same 649 sq ft one-bedder. When you advertise, you are competing against neighbours holding an almost identical product, which compresses rent rather than raises it.

If your priority is a tenant who stays three years instead of one, the 854 sq ft B series does that better — families move less often. Lower gross yield, steadier net.

They answer different questions. City centre stock near the CIQ is priced on cross-border access — you pay for metres to the checkpoint, and in most of those buildings a foreign buyer can at least be considered. NADI is priced on daily convenience inside a finished precinct, and it is closed to foreign buyers entirely.

Concretely: at NADI you are eight kilometres from the Causeway with a mall across the road, nine neighbours on your floor, and an entry price in the RM400,000s. In the city centre you are inside a one-kilometre radius of the CIQ, sharing a floor with twenty or more units, at a materially higher price per square foot.

If you work in Singapore, buy nearer the crossing. If you work in Johor and want a small building near a hospital, a campus and a mall that already exist, NADI is the more sensible purchase — and being ineligible for foreign buyers is one reason its pricing stayed where it is.