Every residential sale filed in the Johor Bahru district between January and March 2026, read end to end. The median home changed hands at RM550,000, terraced housing accounted for more than half of all sales, and the widely quoted freehold premium turns out to be mostly an illusion.
The gap between the median (RM550,000) and the average (RM622,012) is the first thing worth noticing. An average sits higher than a median whenever a handful of expensive sales pull it upward, and that is exactly what happened here: the quarter's cheapest sale was a RM50,000 low-cost flat, its dearest a RM2.6 million detached house. A 52-times spread between the two ends of one district is why a single "average Johor Bahru price" is close to meaningless in practice, and why the estimator on this site compares your property against nearby sales of the same type rather than against a district-wide number.
Two hundred and twenty-nine of the 410 sales — 56% — were one, two or two-and-a-half storey terraced houses. No other category comes close. If you are buying or selling in Johor Bahru, you are almost certainly transacting in the terraced market, and the comparables that matter to you are other terraced houses on nearby roads.
The averages beside each bar carry a warning of their own. Semi-detached houses average RM1.57 million here, but that figure rests on just 17 sales. With samples that small, two unusually large houses can move the average by six figures. Treat the terraced and condominium rows as reliable, and the bottom three rows as indicative only.
Low-cost flats averaged RM185,923 across 26 sales. Two-and-a-half storey semi-detached houses averaged RM1,568,294 across 17. That is a factor of 8.4× between the cheapest and dearest housing types inside a single district — and both are legitimate Johor Bahru homes bought by real families in the same three months.
This is the single most useful thing to understand about local price data. Johor Bahru is not one market that happens to have a range; it is several distinct markets that share a postcode. A buyer looking at low-cost flats and a buyer looking at semi-detached houses are not competing for the same stock, are not affected by the same demand, and should not be reading the same average.
Sales concentrated in four mukims (sub-districts). Plentong recorded the most transactions but the lowest median of the four — a reminder that transaction volume and price level are separate questions. A busy area is not necessarily an expensive one; it usually just means more housing stock in the affordable and mid-range bands.
| Mukim | Transactions | Median price |
|---|---|---|
| Plentong | 141 | RM490,000 |
| Pulai | 137 | RM619,000 |
| Tebrau | 96 | RM600,000 |
| Bandar Johor Bahru | 34 | RM502,500 |
| Jelutong | 2 | RM412,500 |
Pulai and Tebrau price above Plentong at the median, by RM129,000 and RM110,000 respectively. Bandar Johor Bahru — the city centre itself — sits lower at the median than either, which surprises people until you look at what actually sells there: a higher share of apartments and older stock, in smaller units. As the next section shows, the city centre is in fact the most expensive ground in the district once you measure by floor area instead of by whole units.
Across all 410 sales, freehold properties averaged RM651,249 and leasehold properties averaged RM437,196. That is a 49% premium, or RM214,052 — and it is the kind of number that gets quoted as evidence that freehold titles command a large price advantage.
It does not survive scrutiny. Compare like with like — terraced houses only — and the picture collapses:
| Comparison | Freehold avg | Leasehold avg | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| All property types (354 vs 56 sales) | RM651,249 | RM437,196 | +49% |
| Terraced houses only (210 vs 19 sales) | RM663,176 | RM643,842 | +3% |
What is really going on: the leasehold sample is not a cheaper version of the freehold sample — it is a different mix of housing. Of the 56 leasehold sales, 15 were low-cost flats and low-cost houses, and 10 were apartments. Those are inexpensive property types that happen to sit on leasehold land more often. The headline 49% gap is largely measuring the housing mix, not the title.
This is a textbook case of what statisticians call a confounded comparison, and it matters practically: if you own a leasehold terraced house in Johor Bahru, this data does not support the fear that your title alone costs you a third of your value. It supports a modest single-digit difference. Tenure still affects financing terms and the cost of lease extension, which are real considerations — but they are not the same as a 49% valuation haircut.
Price per square foot of floor area is the fairest way to compare schemes, because it strips out the effect of house size. The district averaged RM559 per sq ft. These are the six schemes with at least five recorded sales that came in below that average:
Bandar Johor Bahru is the dearest ground in the district at RM718 per sq ft — 63% above Seri Alam and Scientex. Note how this reverses the ranking from the median table above: the city centre looked mid-priced when measured by whole transactions, because the homes there are small, and expensive when measured by the square foot. Both readings are correct; they answer different questions. "What will a home cost me?" is the median question. "What am I paying for space?" is the per-square-foot question.
Three quarters of the quarter's sales — 313 of 410, or 76% — closed below RM750,000. The single busiest band was RM300,000 to RM500,000.
| Price band | Transactions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under RM300,000 | 62 | 15.1% |
| RM300,000 – RM500,000 | 130 | 31.7% |
| RM500,000 – RM750,000 | 121 | 29.5% |
| RM750,000 – RM1,000,000 | 54 | 13.2% |
| Above RM1,000,000 | 43 | 10.5% |
For a seller, this distribution is the most useful table on the page. If you are asking above RM1 million, you are competing for roughly one buyer in ten. If you are priced between RM300,000 and RM750,000, you are in the band where six of every ten transactions happen. Pricing strategy in a thin market is largely about which side of that line you land on.
The 410 transactions did not fall evenly across the three months: 294 were recorded in January, 112 in February, and just 4 in March. That is not a collapse in the Johor Bahru market. It is how open transaction data is published — sales take time to be registered and released, so the most recent weeks of any dataset are always incomplete and fill in later.
The practical consequence: read this quarter as a picture of January and February, and treat March as not yet reported. Any analysis that draws a downward trend line through these three months is reading a reporting lag as a market movement. When the next NAPIC release lands, March's true count will be substantially higher.
Want the number for one specific property? This report covers the district as a whole. The free estimator works the other way round — describe one property in a sentence and it finds the comparable sales nearest to it.
Try the price estimatorEvery residential transaction recorded in NAPIC's open transaction data for the Johor Bahru district, with a transaction date between January and March 2026 — 410 sales in total. These are transacted prices, the amounts actually paid and registered, not asking prices from listing portals. Listing prices reflect what sellers hope for; transacted prices reflect what buyers agreed to.
Commercial units, shop lots, industrial premises and land-only transactions are not included, so this is a residential-market report. Serviced apartments are also outside this dataset, which is worth noting because they are a significant part of the Johor Bahru high-rise market and would shift the apartment figures if included.
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