Mr Kelvin Yip Kwong Wai
President, Malaysian Institute of Estate Agents (MIEA)
Mr Ethan Leong Yong Sen
Vice President, Malaysian Institute of Estate Agents
Datuk Seri Dr Michael Yam Kong Choy
Chief Judge, National Real Estate Awards (NREA) 2026
Fellow Malaysians and fellow participants
Salam Sejahtera, Salam Malaysia MADANI, and a very good evening to all of you.
I am honoured to join you here tonight to deliver a speech about how I see the mission and purpose of real estate agents in a changing society and in a changing time.
I would also like to congratulate all recipients of the awards. I think you have done well, and you are worth celebrating. I hope this profession will continue to improve on its professionalism and also to broaden its scope and think about its mission.
Transparency and trustworthiness
This profession’s primary mission is to ensure that real estate transactions are transparent and trustworthy. Trust is the basis of a society, and we need all of you to uphold the highest standard of professionalism so that we have a trustworthy society.
Real estate can be full of speculation, and often societies are brought down – economies are brought down – by scams and speculation in the real estate sector. Therefore, your role in ensuring transparency and trustworthiness is very important. Your role is to ensure that society will not be faced with crazy property bubbles and speculative activities. And it is no accident that your profession comes under the regulation of the Finance Ministry, as one of our roles is to ensure that there is growth. We want to ensure that growth is sustainable and not caused by over-investment in real estate and speculation.
I want to bring you to some of the challenges that we are going to face in the years to come, how you can play a role, and how this industry can contribute to shaping our society.
One of the biggest challenges that leaders of societies or leaders of governments around the world have to deal with is to think about how to ensure that our country will be stable and sustainable, and that there will be growth. We also have to ensure that there is not going to be a Gen Z protest. What is a Gen Z protest? You just have to read through the newspaper or check the Internet. There is currently a Gen Z protest in India, Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, and many other societies over the last few years.
How do we ensure that our young feel that they are part of society? How do we ensure that the young feel that they belong and that they have a stake in society? That often keeps politicians and leaders awake at night, because we face a situation where, globally, young people – especially Gen Z – feel that they are disempowered and that the system is stacked against them. I think this is a conversation that we have to keep in mind, and real estate agents have a role to play.
Housing ownership and rental
Of course, the other challenge is how we ensure that our society grows rich before it grows old. And as far as housing is concerned, we also have to start thinking about how to house an aging society.
Most of us in Malaysia usually think about housing as ownership, but as far as estate agents are concerned, you deal with both ownership and rental housing. You also now have a huge category of industrial buildings that you have to deal with. These are areas that we should think about.
Why do I mention rental, and why is rental so important? Because for the longest time, we have only thought mostly about home and house ownership. But we have a sizable number of young people who, because of long-term stagnated wages in the country, may not necessarily be able to own houses. Median house prices have increased from about RM150,000 in 2010 to about
RM350,000 in 2025 – over the last 15 years – and that has not necessarily been in tandem with wages. Therefore, young people have a challenge in owning property.
It is important for us to start taking rental more seriously, and to build a more trustworthy legal framework, as well as a more equitable legal framework, both for people who rent and for people who rent out. This is a policy area that your association and the Government will have to continue to work on, so that we can build a more robust rental market and that rental market should be able to take care of some of the needs of the young.
Problem of sprawling the city
It is also time for us to start thinking about the impact of climate. In those days, Malaysia practised a general rule of thumb: we kept bringing housing development farther from the city centre. We built as far as possible, we sprawled the city as far as possible, and we built highways to link those cities. But at some point, this model will come to an end because, for instance, for every litre of oil being used on the road today, the Finance Ministry has to find money to pay for subsidies.
In the long run, our societies will not be able to keep sprawling the city, to keep pushing the borders of the city as far as possible. We need to think about how to bring housing back to the inner city; how to bring housing closer to the city; how to bring housing closer to where the train station is; how to improve bus services; how to bring people to work without having to travel for
an hour or two hours in a private car. I think this is one of the greatest challenges for Malaysia to think about in the next decade or so.
We have a paradoxical situation in the inner city. In inner-city Kuala Lumpur, for example, there are at least 70 purpose-built office buildings which are not used, and we also have very low occupancy in many shopping malls. It is time for us to really seriously think about how to bring the population back to the inner city – especially the younger population – so that they do not necessarily have to own a car, and they do not necessarily have to own a house, but they can stay close to where they work.
In fact, this is not just for Kuala Lumpur. Datuk Seri Michael Yam is from Kluang. With railways going to different places, with the ETS going to different places, smaller towns are being linked by railway; and with more train sets coming on board in the years to come, we will have more trains coming to serve different towns in Johor and on the northern side. The old town centre in Kluang and other train-linked towns deserve new attention. We may seriously want to relook at how we sprawl cities in secondary cities like Kluang and other smaller cities. That is also an area where estate agents can look, with a fresh pair of eyes, into new possibilities.
Industrial land
I would also like to bring your attention to the question of industry. I am not sure how you look at the economy. There are people who, of course, will complain about the economy. But I believe some of you in this room must be reasonably happy, at least those who are involved in industrial land. You are probably reasonably happy about the changes and the upward trend in industrial land over the last couple of years.
In fact, in July 2023, Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim launched the Madani Economy framework, and in September 2023, we launched the New Industrial Master Plan 2030. Over the last couple of years, we have seen an uptake in industrial land. I would say that industrial land has become a new subject for many people, and some of you must have been involved.
Malaysia has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to develop our industry. For the longest time – since 1997, almost 30 years ago – we had our first takeoff, which stopped in 1997, followed by China joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001. For a period of 20 years, the world did not
look at Malaysia as an important industrial society, because China was the main economic centre and all the industrial investment went to China. But today, because of geopolitical changes and competition, because of the need for diversification, and because of the need for supply chain resilience, industrial land in Malaysia has suddenly become the attention of the world, because the world has found that there are not many places which have the ecosystem of Malaysia. And of course, the Government is very keen to create a second wave, a second take-off, for Malaysian industry.
What I would urge all of you, especially estate agents who are involved in industrial land, is to pay attention to the development of industry, and not to just think about selling land. Moving
forward, with this once-in-a-generation opportunity to develop Malaysian industry, it is not just about selling individual pieces of industrial land; it is really about creating industrial clusters. How do we create industrial clusters that will ensure that we have supply chain resilience, and that we will actually grow well into the long-term future?
Conclusion
I say all this because I believe that real estate agents have an important role to play in our society. You are not just ensuring that deals are trustworthy, that there is no speculation, and that all deals are proper deals. It is also about shaping the deals. Your purpose and mission can be aligned with the Government and with the nation: to see Malaysia growing well; to see more Malaysians being housed, especially Gen Z, while at the same time starting to think about housing our senior citizens in a decent manner; to think about how to build cities that work, cities that are climate-friendly, without having to sprawl the city everywhere; and eventually, to think about the industrial future of Malaysia. I believe we can grow the nation together.
Hopefully, in the years to come, we can say that the years ahead will be much better than the years before us, that Malaysia will have a second takeoff, and that Malaysia will have a great future, with your participation.
With that, I thank you, and I congratulate you on a great event. Thank you.