Cheapest still, apartment rental in KL. (higher end market, not affordable ones)

How cheap is it to work in KL and renting a place not too far away from office? I think it is still cheap if not affordable. Reason? There are plenty of choices which meant that the homeowners are not the most powerful when it comes to bargaining power. Well, unless of course that property is in a hotspot and somehow we must stay there instead of elsewhere. Here’s an earlier article about my thoughts. Once you rent high, you may never buy Nothing wrong really, to enjoy life since it’s our hard-earned money and making that homeowner richer. 
There are quite a number of people or company that agrees to my view. Anyway, they are experts, I am just a working professional like the majority of us. Here’s an article in freemalaysiatoday.com quoting a study by Rentcafe (link to the original study here) as well as comments from a few industry experts. According to Rentcafe, a US-based apartment search website, Kuala Lumpur is the cheapest place in the world to rent apartments. Their study showed that those renting apartments in Kuala Lumpur will need to spend just 20% of their income on rent. This means that if we earn RM5,000 we would most probably be spending RM1,000 for rental. Perhaps it’s true since those earning RM5,000 may prefer to rent the whole apartment to themselves instead of sharing? By the way, my younger relative pays SGD600 for room rental and he earns about SGD2,900. That’s around 20 percent too. Of course, if he save, he would soon be able to start his property investment in Malaysia. I hope he is reading this. For even more interesting stuffs from Rentcafe, click here. 
The article also quoted the Executive director of Jones Lang Wootton, Prem Kumar who shared this, “Almost 90%-95% of the market is domestically driven.”  (Since Malaysians could not afford to pay a few thousand to rent an apartment every month, it’s going to be still cheap…)  Chief executive officer of Zerin Properties Sdn Bhd, Previndran Singhe shared that apartment rentals in Kuala Lumpur were the most affordable among major Southeast Asian cities. (I inserted an image of rental in Bangkok,mostly apartments. From this and in comparison to the usual salaries of Thai professionals, I think KL is indeed cheaper than even Bangkok. Find out more here) For some developing ASEAN countries, the rental for similar apartments would be quoted in US$. By the way, in terms of actual numbers, this is what Rentcafe says. Median household income of those in Kuala Lumpur is US$22,400 (RM96,052) and that average rental per year is about US$4,500 (RM19,296). Here’s that article in FMT again. 
I just came back from Hong Kong not too long ago. Anything related to property is expensive there. Yes, it is still expensive even when we look at their earnings versus the Malaysian professionals. Food is cheap. In fact renting a badminton court and playing is very cheap since their (Hong Kongers) salaries are really far higher than us. However, add in any property related equation and everything goes haywire. Most of my managerial level colleagues with families own a car. However they do not drive to work because the car park is expensive. HKD25 per hour. 10 hours would thus be HKD250 per day. This is more than enough for 6 meals in Hong Kong’s char chan theng (our equivalent of kopi tiam). As for the homes, some recent ones launched include this: Micro apartments vs Tesla Still think KL is expensive? Well, there’s Selangor for consideration too. Penang’s rentals are even more cheaper versus the property price!  🙂
written on 22 June 2017
Next suggested article: It’s too expensive. Stop buying properties