There has been many predictions about Bank Negara hiking the interest rate which is at this moment is still considered very low. Assuming, this really do happen tomorrow, should you be sweating now? I think, for the 86% who owns just one mortgage loan in Malaysia today, it is not likely that they would be sweating. Assuming you have a RM500,000 loan today, with 4.25% interest rate and a 30 year term and the interest rate goes up 0.5% tomorrow, you would have to fork out an additional RM133.73 Table as follows: 
Oh yeah, did I mention that majority of all analysts are saying that it’s only a 0.25% hike and it may or may not happen tomorrow. What an accurate prediction. ‘It may or may not happen tomorrow’. 🙂 Would it slow down the property transactions further? Well, it might, if everyone is very negative about it. Anyway, RHB Research said that from the third quarter onwards, we should see a better set of numbers. It gave a few names of property developers which are selling more homes. They are Tambun Indah Land Bhd and Matrix Concepts. Besides that, loan approvals has also started to move up since late first quarter.
Actually, my friends in the industry are still saying that many agents are today struggling. Reason being, every buyer is so much more cautious and is checking everything and researching everything since information is readily available. Some even stopped their purchase when they learnt of dengue cases in the condo they were about to buy!
The bad thing about slowdown is, everyone is negative about it. My friends, my colleagues, many kopiandproperty.my readers said the same thing. The good thing about slowdown is, after the slowdown, as long as the economy does ok, it will start to inch up. Malaysia is too young a country to have reached maturity. Definitely not yet.
written on 9 July 2014
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