REHDA briefed the press at Wisma Rehda on 23 September, and four papers came away with four different headlines. Put them in order and they stop being four stories. They are one loop.
The cycle, in six steps
Construction costs rose an average of 13% between March and June 2026. Not over the year, over one quarter. Ninety per cent of developers surveyed were hit, with earthworks and infrastructure up 20% to 25% (The Edge Malaysia, 23 September 2026).
That has to go into the price. There is nowhere else for it to go.
But the same inflation that raised your costs also raised your buyer's. Groceries, car loans, school fees, everything. So the buyer arrives at the bank already carrying more commitments than they were carrying two years ago, and asks to borrow more than they would have needed two years ago.
The bank says no. End-financing loan rejection is now the single biggest reason completed homes sit unsold, at 30%, ahead of high pricing at 21% and unreleased Bumiputera units at 16% (EdgeProp, 23 September 2026).
Zaini Yusoff, REHDA's president, named the three causes of those rejections: "purchasers' income eligibility, lower margins of financing offered by financial institutions, and applicants' adverse credit histories".
Read them again. Every one is a symptom of the same squeeze that pushed your costs up.
So the stock does not clear. Fifty-nine per cent of the 181 developers surveyed were holding unsold completed units as of 30 June, and 32% of that stock has been sitting for more than three years.
And then the last step, which is where most of the industry is standing right now: 63% of developers delayed their launches.
Delaying a launch does not break the cycle
It is understandable, and it is a knee-jerk. Holding back protects you from adding to your own unsold pile this quarter. That is the whole of what it does. It lowers no costs, repairs no buyer's debt service ratio, and shifts none of the stock you are already carrying.
The supply is coming anyway: 18,696 units are planned for 2H2026, 18% more than the first half. Delaying does not remove them from the market. It pushes them into a later, more crowded window with another two quarters of cost inflation priced in.
The part you can actually control
You cannot fix construction costs or repair a household's commitments. Those are somebody else's levers.
What you control is how well you find the buyers who can still buy, and they are still there. Developers sold 5,260 units in the first half, up 3.2%, and apartments and condominiums took up at 58% (Malay Mail, 23 September 2026). The good buyers have not disappeared. They have become rarer, and harder to identify.
That is a mining problem, not a marketing problem. The gold is still in the ground. There is just less of it per tonne, so it takes more patience and better equipment to pull it out. What it does not call for is putting down the shovel.
Three things that actually help
1. Do not stop looking
The first instinct in a soft quarter is to cut the advertising. It is the easiest line to cut and nobody notices for a month.
Then they do. Stop telling people about the project and you do not slow the stream of buyers, you end it. When the cycle turns, whoever kept talking has a pipeline and whoever went quiet starts from nothing.
Run them strategically rather than loudly. But keep running them.
2. Put in a system that remembers every potential buyer
When the good buyer is rare, losing one to a forgotten follow-up costs far more than it used to.
For every enquiry you need to know when they are actually looking to buy, what they want, what they can afford and what they do for a living. Not in an agent's head. On a record.
That is what Sales Control is for. The AI scores leads on how they reply rather than on how they filled in a form, and it holds the budget, the timing and the objections. When an agent leaves, that does not leave with them.
3. Keep talking to them
This part cannot be automated and should not be. Talk to them, ask questions, understand where they are.
A buyer the bank turns down today is not gone. A car loan ends, a salary moves, a guarantor appears, and in nine months the same person is approvable. You will only know if you are still in contact when it happens.
That is how you unearth the good ones.
Without a system, a slow quarter just gets blamed on the economy
Which is the trap. The cycle above is real and none of it is your fault. That makes it very easy to stop looking at the parts of the process that are yours.
PM us to find out how Sales Control works.
