Conlay by E&O

Start with the two documents themselves. E&O publishes Developer’s Licence 19758-1/09 2022/02945(L) and Sales and Advertising Permit 19758-1/09 2022/02945(P), both stated as valid 27/09/2021 to 26/09/2022. Ask for the current licence number, the current permit number and their validity dates, and ask for a copy rather than a verbal assurance. A developer that publishes the old ones in full text should have no difficulty producing the new ones.

Then ask about the date. The permit gives an expected date of completion of February 2024. That has passed, and no revised completion date has been published anywhere. Ask for the revised date in writing, and ask what the sale and purchase agreement says about the delivery period and about liquidated damages if it is missed. The agreement, not the brochure, is what you can enforce.

Then ask about the works. There is no construction progress percentage, no milestone update and no site photograph on any official channel at all. That is unusual, and it is the single easiest gap for the developer to close. Ask for the architect’s certification of the current stage of works, which is a document that already exists if the project is progressing.

I want to be precise about what this means, because it would be easy to overstate it. Either E&O’s published permit page is simply out of date, or marketing is running on a lapsed permit. Those are very different situations, and a buyer cannot currently tell them apart from public sources. I am reporting the state of the public record, not making an allegation. Get the answer in writing before you pay a booking fee, and let your solicitor read it before you sign anything.

Development Type on this permit reads Serviced Apartment, and that is a tariff and assessment class rather than a description of the lobby. In Malaysia a serviced apartment is typically built on commercially zoned land while being lived in exactly like a home, and the consequences land on your bills rather than in the brochure.

In practice that usually means four things. Electricity and water are billed at commercial tariffs instead of domestic ones. DBKL assessment is struck at the commercial rate instead of the residential rate. The maintenance charge is set against a service-led building with concierge infrastructure, lifts serving a tall tower and a facilities deck, which is not the same cost base as a plain block of flats. And your bank may categorise the title differently from a residential condominium when it sizes your loan, which for a foreign buyer sits on top of a margin that typically runs 60 to 70 per cent anyway.

None of that is hidden, but none of it is on the marketing page either, where the vocabulary is residence, urban resort and hospitality. Both descriptions are accurate. Only one of them shows up on the twelfth of the month.

There is one place where the residential label bites in your favour and against you at once: tax. The Finance Act 2025 expressly lists service apartments and SOHOs as residential property, so a non-citizen buying here pays the flat 8% stamp duty introduced on 1 January 2026, with no tiering and no first-home relief. Commercial for your electricity bill, residential for your stamp duty. Ask for the utility tariff, the assessment rate and the lender’s title classification in writing before you commit.

Yes, you can buy. Here is what to watch. Kuala Lumpur applies a RM1,000,000 minimum purchase price to foreign interests. On this project that threshold is not the constraint — the cheapest unit on the permit is RM1,460,000, so every published unit clears it with room to spare. The gates that actually bite here are the definition and the timing.

The definition first, because this is the part people get wrong. Foreign interest expressly includes Malaysian permanent residents. A permanent resident who has lived here for two decades, holds a local mortgage and pays tax here is still treated as a foreign interest for these purposes, and walks through the same consent process as someone buying from overseas. A Singaporean buyer is in the same position, as is anyone holding a long-stay visa — a visa is not citizenship. If you are a permanent resident and an agent has told you the rules do not apply to you, get a second opinion before you sign.

The timing second. Consent under section 433B of the National Land Code is granted in the Federal Territory by the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur Land Working Committee — the Jawatankuasa Kerja Tanah Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur — and applied for through the Federal Territory Land and Mines Office after the sale and purchase agreement has been signed. Not the economic planning unit, and it is the Land Working Committee, not any executive committee. So the sequence is: you sign, then your solicitor applies, then you wait. That waiting period has to be reflected in the agreement, in your loan offer validity, and in your currency planning.

Two other numbers belong in your model even though this page does not work through the arithmetic. Since 1 January 2026 a non-citizen buying residential property pays a flat 8% stamp duty on the transfer instrument, and service apartments are expressly residential for that purpose. On exit, Real Property Gains Tax for non-citizens and foreign companies is 30% within five years and 10% from the sixth year onward, with no zero-rate band ever. Tell me your nationality and residency status and I will map which gates apply to you before you pay anything.

Because it almost certainly belongs to a unit type that has never been published. The permit gives a selling price range of RM1,460,000 minimum to RM8,780,000 maximum. The largest layout published anywhere by E&O is Type D at 1,335 sq ft. Put those together and the arithmetic stops making sense.

Work it through. The permit minimum against the smallest published plan is RM1,460,000 over 743 sq ft, roughly RM1,965 per sq ft. Now force the permit maximum onto the largest published plan: RM8,780,000 over 1,335 sq ft is about RM6,577 per sq ft. No developer sells the top unit in its own building at more than three times its own entry rate for a layout only 80 per cent larger. Something else is in the price list.

The supporting evidence sits on E&O’s own server. There are floor-plan image assets under codes such as type-a, type-b, type-b4, type-b5, type-d1 and type-d2 that are described nowhere and carry no areas at all, and the official all-layouts PDF is an image with no extractable text. So the published schedule of seven types is demonstrably not the complete schedule.

The practical consequence is simple and it matters more than the puzzle itself: the published 743 to 1,335 sq ft range is not the real ceiling of this building. If you are shopping at the top end, ask for the complete price list by type, including everything above Type D, and ask for the stamped drawings. If you are shopping at the bottom end, ask which type the RM1,460,000 refers to and on which floor band, because an entry price quoted without a unit attached is not a price.

The published schedule has no studios in it. E&O’s corporate project page describes the layout range as Studio to 2+1 Bedrooms, but every one of the seven layouts actually published on the microsite is a bedroom unit: A1 743 sq ft one bedroom, A2 904 sq ft one bedroom, B1 743 sq ft one plus one, B2 840 sq ft one plus one, B3 980 sq ft one plus one, C 1,206 sq ft two bedrooms, and D 1,335 sq ft two plus one. The smallest published unit is 743 sq ft, which is a generous one-bedroom by Kuala Lumpur standards, not a studio.

So either the word studio on the corporate page is loose marketing shorthand, or there is a smaller type that has never been drawn. I cannot tell you which, and I am not going to guess in either direction.

On the count of types, seven are published and the real number is higher. Undescribed plan assets sit on the official server under codes including type-a, type-b, type-b4, type-b5, type-d1 and type-d2, with no areas attached, and the permit’s RM8,780,000 maximum implies at least one tier above Type D. Seven is what E&O chose to show, not what it is selling.

Bathroom counts and floor bands are not published for any type either, which is why you will not find them on this page. When a developer will not tell you how many bathrooms a 1,335 sq ft unit has, the answer is not on the internet — it is on the stamped drawing. Ask for it by type and by floor, and read the strata area against the built-up area while you are at it.

Nothing is included. All three are optional and chargeable. E&O markets three items as first class services: a 24/7 concierge, an exclusive chef for private dining, and a comprehensive handyman solution. The only fine print published against them is this, word for word: “Optional services, additional charges apply. Services are subject to change and are dependent on availability.”

Read that sentence carefully, because it does most of the work. Optional means you pay per use. Subject to change means the menu can shrink. Dependent on availability means there is no service level guarantee at all. That is an à-la-carte paid concierge offering, and it is a perfectly reasonable thing to sell — as long as you know that is what it is.

Here is what it is not, and this is the part that gets misread in listings. It is not hotel branding. It is not hotel management. There is no leaseback, no rental pool, no guaranteed return and no operator promising to fill your unit when you are not in it. If somebody tells you otherwise, ask them to show you where E&O published it, because I could not find it.

The building facilities themselves are a separate matter and are published as a flat list with no levels: heated swimming pools, fitness centres, jacuzzis, sauna rooms, a multi-purpose lounge and function room, meeting, music, billiard and multimedia rooms, and a pool deck with a bar and a kids pool. Those come with the building and are paid for through the maintenance charge. The three concierge items do not.

E&O has not published it, so it is not on this page, and I am not going to invent a rate per square foot to fill the gap. No maintenance charge, no sinking fund percentage, no share-unit basis has been published anywhere I can verify.

The reason nobody can tell you yet is structural rather than evasive. On a project that has not been handed over, the charge is set by the developer for the initial period and then by the joint management body once one is formed, and it is calculated against share units allocated per parcel. Until the share-unit schedule is issued and the building’s actual operating budget is drawn up, any number quoted to you is somebody’s estimate wearing a suit.

What you can do is bracket it sensibly. This is a Serviced Apartment on the permit, which points to a commercial cost base for utilities and assessment on the common property. It has a facilities list running to pools, jacuzzis, saunas, several function and games rooms and a pool deck, all of which have to be cleaned, staffed, insured and eventually replaced. And it is 491 units on 1.4 acres, so the common property is tall rather than wide, which means lifts and facade access rather than lawns. None of that suggests the cheap end of the market.

So ask three things in writing before you sign: the projected charge per square foot for the first year, the sinking fund contribution as a percentage, and the share-unit allocation for your specific parcel. That third one is the document that turns a rate into your actual monthly bill, and it is the one people forget to ask for.

Start with the market you are letting into. NAPIC’s Kuala Lumpur figures for the first quarter of 2026 record 3,733 units of residential overhang and 4,181 unsold completed serviced apartment units. Completed stock that nobody has bought is what caps rents, because it can be discounted quickly and it does not clear fast. That is the backdrop for any unit in this city, including this one.

Then look at what is specific here. The genuine strengths are an MRT station effectively at the door on the Putrajaya Line, one stop from KLCC East and one stop from TRX; a freehold title; and a school cluster the developer publishes at 0.7 km for EtonHouse, 3.0 km for Sayfol, 4.0 km for the International School of Kuala Lumpur and 4.7 km for Taylor’s International. Those distances are E&O’s own figures, not measurements I took, but they describe a real family-tenant catchment rather than a purely transient one. Units of 743 to 1,335 sq ft with one, one plus one and two-bedroom layouts suit that tenant profile better than they suit a nightly-stay operator.

The honest weaknesses are just as concrete. This is a small, expensive building — 491 units, from RM1.46 million — which means very few comparable lettings and very few comparable sales, so both rent-setting and resale valuation are done on thin evidence. There is no published construction progress, so you cannot yet judge when rental income would even begin. And the concierge services are optional and chargeable, which means there is no operator underwriting your occupancy.

What I will not do is quote you a yield. Not a projected one, not an assured one, not a guaranteed one — no number of that kind belongs on a page about a building that has not published a completion date. When there is a handover date and real asking rents in the building, I will build the figure with you from actual listings, and you will be able to see every input.

They are four different answers to four different questions, so start with which question is yours. If your question is “what can I inspect and move into”, look at SO/ Kuala Lumpur Residences. It is the finished one: completed in August 2025 with handover from September 2025, freehold, 590 units of 566 to 995 sq ft. You can walk the corridors, meet the management, look at the actual finishes and check the lifts on a Monday morning. Nothing on this page about permits or unpublished plans applies there in the same way, because the building exists.

If your question is “which has the strongest sponsor and the largest product”, that is Conlay by E&O, this project. It is the biggest ticket of the four — 491 units from RM1.46 million to RM8.78 million on the permit — with a Bursa-listed parent, freehold land and, unusually, land recorded on the permit as carrying no encumbrances. Set against that: its published advertising permit and developer’s licence both expired on 26 September 2022, its permitted completion date of February 2024 has passed, no revised date has been published, and there is no construction progress reporting of any kind. It has the best pedigree and the largest unanswered questions at the same time.

If your question is “what is the cheapest way in”, that is Victory Suites at The Face II, from RM1,081,000. It completed in 2022 and is still selling, which tells you something in itself, and there is a 327-room hotel operating inside the same tower — which is a different living proposition and a different lift-lobby experience from a purely residential building. Cheapest entry, most operational complexity.

And if your question is “what is the next big thing”, the honest answer is that Royal Lexis Kuala Lumpur cannot yet be evaluated by anybody. No price, no permit, no completion date and no unit count has been published. That is not a criticism of the project; it is a statement about the evidence available. You cannot compare a building to a rendering.

My own ranking depends entirely on your risk appetite and your timing. Buying to occupy within a year: SO/ Kuala Lumpur Residences, because it is real today. Buying the strongest asset and willing to do the document work: Conlay by E&O, but only after you have a valid permit and a written completion date in your hand. Buying on price: Victory Suites, with the hotel operation priced in. Watching rather than buying: Royal Lexis. Tell me your timeline and your budget and I will narrow it to one.