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You may not believe in feng shui. The personyou sell to in ten years might. In Malaysia, that is the practical reason to check it before you buy: it does not change how a home feels to live in, but it can change how many buyers will look at it when you sell.
What Malaysian buyers actually look at
A 2020 study of homebuyers in the Klang Valley, published in the journal Property Management, asked people to rate 26 feng shui elements. Five came out on top: the direction the house faces, the main entrance, where the street sits relative to the house, the house or unit number, and the living room. Malay, Chinese and Indian respondents ranked these elements in much the same order, so this is not only a Chinese-buyer question.
The five checks, in plain terms
- Facing. Which way the front door and the main windows face. In practice this overlaps with sun and heat, which I cover in a separate article.
- Main entrance. What you see when the door opens. A view straight through to the back door, a toilet door or a staircase facing the entrance is widely disliked.
- Street position. Houses facing a T-junction, at the end of a dead-end road, or below road level are avoided by many buyers of every background.
- Number. The number 4 sounds like “death” in Mandarin and many Chinese dialects, so addresses with a 4 (and for some buyers 13) are harder to sell to that group. Some buildings skip these floor numbers altogether.
- Living room. A regular, well-lit living room that is not cut through by the path from the door to the kitchen.
What this means for price
The study measured what buyers care about, not exact price discounts, and I have not seen reliable figures for how much a “number 4” unit sells for less. What agents and owners commonly report is slower resale and buyers using it to bargain. Treat it as a risk to your exit, not a fixed discount.
How I would use this
- If two units in the same building are otherwise equal, pick the one fewer buyers will object to. It costs you nothing today.
- If a unit with a “bad” feature is clearly cheaper, it can still be a good buy for own stay. Just price in a smaller buyer pool when you sell.
- For landed homes, walk the street: junctions, slopes, drains and the road level matter more than anything inside, because you cannot renovate them away.
Questions about a specific unit?
Send me the unit number and floor plan and I will tell you how buyers in that area are likely to see it, alongside the recorded prices.
Sources: J.B.H. Yap and K.C. Lum, “Feng Shui principles and the Malaysian housing market”, Property Management, 2020; StarProperty, “Common taboos that affect properties”, Jan 2018
Jason Lim, REN 84424, IQI Realty Sdn. Bhd. E (1) 1584/6. Feng shui is a belief system, not a building standard; this article explains how it affects buyers and resale, and is general information, not advice.