This site is focused on providing information for expats looking for information about living or buying real estate in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The information may also be useful to other looking at real estate in Malaysia.

In general when you find an agent to help you the agent will have properties they represent for owners and those are the properties they have to show you. The owners should pay the fees so you will not have a real estate agent fee. However, you should verify this before you start looking.

This also means you may well need to use several agents to look at more properties than the agent has access to. Some agents will work with other agents (in their agency, normally) to give you wider access. But this is still much different than the way things work where some expats are from where you pay an agent who looks for any property no matter who the owner’s agent is.

I did have more trouble finding an agent in Johor Bahru than I did in Penang. I can suggest interviewing the following to see if they meet your needs:

• CN Wang
• Abby Looi (she specializes in Straights View, I believe, and is familiar with Molek Pine)

I also strongly suggest interviewing them before you arrive in Johor Bahru and having several trips scheduled. The rental market in Johor Bahru is in the renters favor currently (more vacancies than people looking) so you can probably bargain down the rates (in some instances the owner may have already reduced the rate in order to get a quick rental – which may make bargaining hard).

I am also sure there are plenty of more good agents to help with expats special needs, but I had a great deal of trouble, and lots of completely ignored emails, from many agents and agencies that seem to have inventory of properties expats would be interested in.

The agents you see with lots of listings often have assistants that help them manage the listings and customers. This is fine, as long as the quality of that help is high.

One way to find an agent is just look for agents that have a number of properties available at the condos or estates you are interested in (either on their own web sites, the realty companies web site or sites like iProperty).

Agents interested in a sponsored listing can contact me by adding a comment below.