Johor Bahru gets the headlines, the rail link and the investor attention. But measured by median transacted price across five years of NAPIC records, Tangkak rose 32% and Muar 28% — both ahead of Johor Bahru's 24%. Batu Pahat, meanwhile, managed just 11%.
These are median transacted prices for residential property in each district, comparing the full year 2021 with the full year 2025. Only districts with at least 100 recorded sales in every year are shown, so that the comparison is not built on a handful of transactions.
| District | 2021 median | 2025 median | Change | Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tangkak | RM347,000 | RM458,000 | +32% | RM111,000 |
| Muar | RM389,000 | RM500,000 | +28% | RM111,000 |
| Segamat | RM263,000 | RM330,000 | +26% | RM67,000 |
| Johor Bahru | RM452,000 | RM560,000 | +24% | RM108,000 |
| Kluang | RM280,000 | RM345,000 | +23% | RM65,000 |
| Kulai | RM407,000 | RM470,000 | +16% | RM63,000 |
| Batu Pahat | RM360,000 | RM400,000 | +11% | RM40,000 |
Look at the final column. Tangkak's 32% and Johor Bahru's 24% produced almost identical cash gains — RM111,000 against RM108,000 — because Johor Bahru started from a much higher base. A percentage on a small number and a percentage on a large one are not the same thing, and property articles routinely blur the two.
Which one matters depends on your position. If you already own in Johor Bahru, the ringgit figure is your gain. If you are choosing where to buy with a fixed budget, the percentage tells you where the market has been moving fastest relative to its own level.
A five-year comparison can hide a spike. Here is the full year-by-year record, so you can see the shape of each district's move rather than just its endpoints:
| District | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Johor Bahru | 452,000 | 470,000 | 518,000 | 518,000 | 560,000 |
| Muar | 389,000 | 420,000 | 450,000 | 460,000 | 500,000 |
| Kulai | 407,000 | 400,000 | 450,500 | 475,000 | 470,000 |
| Tangkak | 347,000 | 379,000 | 419,000 | 388,000 | 458,000 |
| Batu Pahat | 360,000 | 375,000 | 350,000 | 380,000 | 400,000 |
| Kluang | 280,000 | 278,000 | 315,000 | 300,000 | 345,000 |
| Segamat | 263,000 | 274,000 | 260,000 | 300,000 | 330,000 |
All figures are median transacted prices in ringgit.
Muar and Johor Bahru rose in almost every year — a genuine trend. Tangkak, Kluang, Batu Pahat and Segamat each had a down year in the middle, which is what you expect from smaller markets where a hundred sales more or less can move the median. The direction is consistent; the path is bumpy.
A median can rise without any property becoming more valuable, if the mix of what sells shifts towards larger or better homes. To test that, we repeated the exercise on terraced houses alone — one property type, so a mix shift between types cannot explain the result:
| District | 2021 terraced | 2025 terraced | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tangkak | RM330,000 | RM456,500 | +38% |
| Muar | RM390,000 | RM500,000 | +28% |
| Johor Bahru | RM517,000 | RM600,000 | +16% |
| Kulai | RM420,000 | RM480,000 | +14% |
| Kluang | RM271,000 | RM300,000 | +11% |
| Segamat | RM288,000 | RM295,000 | +2% |
| Batu Pahat | RM406,000 | RM413,000 | +2% |
The finding survives, and sharpens. On terraced houses alone, Tangkak's lead widens to 38% and Muar holds at 28%, while Johor Bahru falls back to 16%. Segamat and Batu Pahat, however, drop to about 2% — meaning most of their headline growth came from a change in what was selling rather than from rising prices for the same kind of house.
This is why the two tables are both worth reading. The first tells you what the market as a whole did. The second tells you what happened to a specific, comparable product. For an owner asking "has my terraced house gone up?", the second table is the honest answer — and in Segamat and Batu Pahat that answer is: barely.
The data shows what happened, not why. These are plausible contributing factors rather than demonstrated causes, and we present them as such.
What the data does not support is the simple story that infrastructure announcements in the south automatically translated into the fastest price growth in the south. Over these five years, they did not.
This is a record of what has already happened. It is not a forecast, and past movements in property prices are a poor guide to future ones — particularly in thin markets where the trend line is drawn through relatively few sales.
It is also a district-level view. Within any district, individual schemes and roads diverge widely: a scheme near a new highway interchange and one on the far side of the same district do not share a price trajectory just because they share an administrative boundary. If your interest is one specific property, a district growth rate is the wrong tool.
Looking at one property rather than a district? The free estimator compares a specific property against the transactions nearest to it — same road first, then the surrounding scheme.
Try the price estimatorAll figures are median transacted prices from NAPIC (JPPH Malaysia) open transaction data — amounts actually paid and registered, not asking prices. The analysis covers residential property only; shop lots, offices, industrial premises and land-only transactions are excluded.
Districts are included only where at least 100 residential sales were recorded in every year from 2021 to 2025. Kota Tinggi, Mersing and Pontian fall below that threshold in at least one year and are therefore not shown — not because nothing happened there, but because the data is too thin to support a five-year comparison.
Medians are used throughout rather than averages, because a handful of high-value sales would otherwise dominate a small district's figure. The terraced-only comparison uses the same method restricted to one property type, with a minimum of 60 terraced sales in each of the two comparison years.
A note on 2025 counts: transaction data is published with a reporting lag, so 2025 shows fewer recorded sales than earlier years and will fill in as further releases are published. This affects the counts, not the median price level.
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