Forest City, a $100B ghost town in Malaysia

I like to view supply/demand literally sometimes as an order book. And here we have a giant chasm of a bid-ask spread.

I suppose you could even draw the supply and demand curves. They just... don't intersect!

Does everything require an overly simplistic supply and demand explanation? It is by design a prestige development that hopes to attract high worth foreigners. If they start pricing it so that locals can afford it, the value will tank because the riff-raff have been let in and the investors will be up in arms. I'm not saying that I like any of this, but it's a for-profit real estate development, not government funded social housing.

They aren't buying a house... They're buying a means to move money out of China and clean it.

> 250x median annual income

Not sure where you got that number. Average salary in JB is about $25k a year.

They are luxury apartments, a few km away from the border of Singapore for $140,000. Compare that to buying the equivalent over the causeway, would be a magnitude higher

Many of them are owned, just not by people who want to live there. It's a place for Chinese people to park money in real estate.

I have the same up north in Penang. For the first year there was no one else living on my floor and the block was basically empty despite nearly all of them being sold. Even a few years later looking at lights at night time I'd say under 40% occupancy of the building. The same for all other skyscrapers in the area, and looking out the window I can see 3 new buildings still going up.

Prices here aren't skyrocketing at all. Actually going down in real terms because they just keep building and building.

Zoom out and check out the housing index for the entire country: https://tradingeconomics.com/malaysia/housing-index

Supply is pushing prices down despite GDP going strong.