Quick answer: Malaysia targets zero abandoned housing projects by 2030. KPKT has revived 1,333 sick or abandoned developments worth RM126.47 billion since 2023 (KPKT Special Task Force / TFST, December 2025), but 105 projects remain abandoned and 335 are classified as sick as of October 2025. Government tools like TEDUH and the mandatory eSPA set the compliance floor. The developers winning trust now are the ones building visible transparency above that floor — and blockchain verification is how.
Malaysia is in the middle of the most significant housing-sector reform in a generation. The Madani government has set a public, audacious target: zero abandoned housing projects by 2030. The legal architecture is being rewritten — the proposed Real Property Development Bill is moving through consultation, an Option to Purchase clause is under study, and mandatory eSPA on the HIMS / TEDUH stack went live on 1 January 2026 (KPKT / The Edge Malaysia, February 2026).
This is good news for buyers. It is more complicated news for developers. The bar for what counts as a credible, trustworthy project has moved sharply upward in the past 18 months, and it will move again before 2030. Developers who treat the new compliance regime as a ceiling will be invisible in the market by 2028. Developers who treat it as a floor — and build visible transparency above it — own the trust premium that’s currently up for grabs.
This article is for developers. It explains where the new floor sits, what the floor still doesn’t show buyers, and why voluntary on-chain verification is the cleanest way to differentiate above it.
The new compliance floor in Malaysia
The TEDUH portal (Transforming and Empowering Data Usage in Housing), run by Jabatan Perumahan Negara under KPKT, is now the front door to every Malaysian housing project. Buyers can search by developer name or project name and see, in real time, the developer’s licence status, Advertising and Sales Permit (APDL), project approval details, current construction progress, and any enforcement action or blacklist status (KPKT TEDUH portal). As of April 2025, the public blacklist held 109 developers (PropertyGuru Malaysia, January 2026).
Behind TEDUH sits HIMS — the Housing Integrated Management System — which feeds developer registrations, project updates and penalties to the public portal automatically. On 1 January 2026, the mandatory eSPA layer went live. Every regulated sale and purchase agreement is now auto-generated by HIMS, digitally signed via the iDsaya identity app, and stored encrypted in TEDUH as part of the National Housing Data Bank (KPKT, via The Edge Malaysia, February 2026). Physical signatures are no longer accepted. Developers who refuse to use eSPA face heavy fines, licence revocation, or frozen Housing Development Accounts.
This is real, substantive progress. The buyer who spends ten minutes on the TEDUH portal before paying a booking fee has more leverage today than a buyer with a lawyer had five years ago. The Special Task Force for Sick and Abandoned Private Housing Projects (TFST), set up in 2023, has revived 1,333 projects with a combined RM126.47 billion gross development value (KPKT / Scoop, December 2025). That is not symbolic — it is the largest housing-sector recovery in over a decade.
The question for serious developers in 2026 is not whether to comply with this floor. Compliance is mandatory. The question is what to build above it.
Where the floor still doesn’t show buyers everything
KPKT’s own analysis is the clearest guide to what buyers still cannot see. The ministry’s published data, developed in collaboration with Universiti Malaya, attributes 73% of housing-project abandonments to financial issues — insufficient funding, poor cash-flow management, insolvency. A further 12% comes from internal management problems and 12% from development-related complications (KPKT / REHDA Institute Abandoned Housing Symposium Report, April 2025).
That 73% figure is the point. The TEDUH portal is excellent at showing buyers formal compliance — licence status, APDL validity, approval state. It is not designed to show buyers project financial health. That gap is precisely where most abandonments originate.
There are three structural reasons the gap persists, all of them rooted in the fact that the underlying legislation — the Housing Development (Control and Licensing) Act 1966 (Act 118) — was drafted six decades ago for a property market that no longer exists.
First, project-level cash management. The HDA 1966 framework requires developers to maintain a Housing Development Account (HDA Account) per project, but funds can in practice be re-allocated between related entities in ways that are difficult for buyers to detect from outside. Minister Nga Kor Ming has publicly acknowledged this, telling Bernama that the ministry plans to “establish escrow accounts” so that “all money paid by homebuyers will be used exclusively for the intended project. Currently, without escrow accounts, developers can transfer funds from Project A to Project B, causing Project A to become abandoned” (KPKT / Focus Malaysia, August 2024).
Second, beneficial ownership of SPV / JV structures. Modern developments are routinely held through joint-venture or special-purpose-vehicle structures. The named licence-holder on TEDUH is correct; what’s behind it isn’t always publicly visible. Buyers cannot easily tell whether the legal entity selling them a unit is well-capitalised, whether it is part of a wider group with a strong track record, or whether it is a single-purpose entity that will dissolve once the project completes.
Third, voluntary milestone reporting. Construction progress is reported to KPKT on a defined cadence, but the cadence is regulatory, not real-time. A project can drift from planned milestones for weeks or months before the public record reflects it. The buyer who checks TEDUH on the day of booking sees a snapshot that may already be stale.
None of these is a failure of TEDUH or of KPKT. They are limits inherent in a regulatory framework that was written before modern corporate structures and that is in the middle of being replaced. The Real Property Development Bill aims to close many of them — but until it is enacted and operationalised, the gap is real and developers can choose whether to fill it.
The three reasons developers verify
We see three commercial reasons developers commission voluntary on-chain verification today, in roughly this order of weight.
Reputation: differentiate in a zero-abandonment market
The 2030 target has changed how Malaysian buyers read every new launch. Every sales gallery is now competing against the buyer’s natural caution about the 105 currently abandoned projects and the 16,000-plus buyers (KR Institute, October 2024) who have been waiting, in some cases since the late 1990s, for homes that may never arrive. Even an excellent developer with zero history of abandonment is being read through that filter.
The fastest way to neutralise that filter is to be demonstrably more transparent than the law requires. A Verified Owner record on a public blockchain — published by the developer, voluntarily, before any sales begin — is a strong, costly-to-fake signal. It says: we are not hiding behind the minimum. We are publishing more than the floor.
This is the same competitive dynamic that has reshaped other trust-sensitive industries. Restaurants display health-grade certificates above the legal minimum. Public companies publish governance reports beyond what listing rules require. Property developers in 2026 are at the point where the legal minimum and the trust minimum have separated, and the developers who close that gap first take the share.
Speed: shorter buyer due diligence converts hesitation to commitment
Buyers in Malaysia’s secondary market currently spend 15–40 hours on due diligence for an unverified condo. In the primary market, where buyers are committing to a unit that doesn’t yet exist, the burden of verification falls even more heavily on the buyer because there is no physical asset to inspect. The buyer who spends three weeks researching a developer is a buyer who can find a reason to delay. A buyer who can complete due diligence in two hours is a buyer who signs the booking form on Saturday.
We covered the speed mechanic in detail in our piece on why verified listings close 30–40% faster. The same dynamic applies to off-plan sales, only more acutely: the higher the perceived risk, the bigger the conversion gain from removing it.
Price: verified developments hold their margin
The buyer-side case for the trust premium — that verified listings command stronger pricing because they remove the hidden risk discount that unverified listings carry — applies just as cleanly to new launches. Research from the United States found that publicly verified listings sold for an average of 17.5% more than comparable unverified ones (Bright MLS / Drexel University On-MLS Study, 2023). The Malaysian market structure is different, the magnitude will be different, but the direction is reliable. Developers who verify capture more of the price they ask for.
This is not a trick to inflate prices. It is the absence of the discount that buyers currently apply to compensate for risk they cannot measure. Take the risk off the table and the discount disappears.
TEDUH compliance vs TEDUH + voluntary verification
The two are not alternatives. Verification only makes sense as a layer above full TEDUH compliance, never as a substitute. Here’s how the two layers actually combine:
| Dimension | TEDUH-only (mandatory floor) | TEDUH + voluntary verification |
| Developer licence (APDL) | Public, real-time via KPKT | Public + cryptographically linked to project on-chain |
| eSPA execution | Required from 1 Jan 2026 | Required + immutably timestamped, hash anchored on-chain |
| Project status updates | KPKT cadence | + voluntary milestone attestations between regulatory updates |
| Beneficial ownership of SPV | Not publicly disclosed | Optionally disclosed via Verified Owner record |
| HDA / escrow account status | Not visible to buyers | Optionally attested by independent third party |
| Buyer due-diligence burden | Verify developer + project on TEDUH | Single on-chain check covers TEDUH baseline + voluntary disclosures |
| Cost to developer per project | RM 0 (compliance) | Low — Polygon transaction fees of roughly USD 0.01 per write |
| Brand signal | Compliant | Compliant + actively transparent |
Two things stand out in that comparison. First, voluntary verification doesn’t fight the regulatory framework — it layers on top of it. KPKT remains the authoritative source for licence status, blacklist data, and statutory compliance. Verification adds the information KPKT was never designed to publish. Second, the marginal cost to a developer is trivial. Polygon’s Layer 2 economics put per-listing verification fees at roughly USD 0.01 per transaction, which is why we built on Polygon in the first place. Verification is no longer a luxury reserved for premium projects; it’s economically viable for every unit.
How developer verification works in practice
The minting process for a developer verification record is straightforward, though the diligence behind it is rigorous. A developer requests verification for a specific project. Stellarise’s verification process confirms the developer’s APDL number against KPKT records, matches the project’s land title against the relevant Land Office, and (at the developer’s option) attests to additional disclosures the developer wishes to make public — beneficial ownership, third-party financial review, milestone targets, escrow arrangements.
Once verified, an NFT representing the project is minted on Polygon. The on-chain record is permanent, timestamped, and publicly searchable. Buyers viewing the project on Stellarise see the Verified Owner badge with one tap; agents marketing the project can link to the on-chain record from their listings; lawyers acting for buyers can confirm the developer’s identity and the underlying disclosures before drafting the SPA.
The full workflow is documented in our complete guide to minting a property NFT on Stellarise. For developers, the practical implication is that verification is a one-time setup per project, not an ongoing operational burden.
This is also where smart contracts earn their keep on the developer side. Milestone attestations can be structured to publish automatically as construction progresses — when a foundation is complete, when each floor is signed off, when CCC (Certificate of Completion and Compliance) is issued. The developer doesn’t have to remember to update buyers; the contract publishes the milestone the moment the attesting party signs. We’ve explained how smart contracts protect property buyers in more detail elsewhere — the same mechanism that protects buyers also reduces operational overhead for developers.
What this looks like for buyers
Buyers don’t need to understand blockchain to use a Verified Owner record. The badge is visible on the listing. The on-chain record is one tap away. The TEDUH check still happens — buyers are taught, rightly, that TEDUH is the legal starting point — but verification answers the questions TEDUH was never built to answer.
For Singapore-based buyers looking at Johor projects, verification matters even more. We have written separately about why property scams in Malaysia have grown 20× in two years and why verification protects buyers who cannot physically check a property. A Singaporean buyer in Iskandar has minimal ability to walk the site on a Wednesday afternoon. The on-chain record is, for them, the closest equivalent to a physical site visit — a real-time, cryptographically anchored proof that the project is what it claims to be.
We will return to the buyer-facing case in our next article, which looks specifically at how blockchain verification helps protect buyers in the context of Malaysia’s 2030 zero-abandonment target.
Why we think this matters for serious Malaysian developers
We will be direct about our own view. The Malaysian property market is two years into the most ambitious housing-sector reform of the past three decades, and it is going to keep moving until 2030. Developers who treat each new regulation — eSPA, the Real Property Development Bill, mandatory escrow — as an obligation to grudgingly comply with will spend the next five years playing catch-up. Developers who treat the same trajectory as the direction of travel and get ahead of it will own the trust segment of the market while it forms.
Voluntary on-chain verification is the cheapest, fastest, most demonstrable way to do that. It does not replace KPKT, it does not replace lawyers, it does not replace the licences and registers that remain authoritative. It adds the layer of voluntary transparency that proves a developer is serious about being trusted, not just compliant. In a market that has spent two years rebuilding from RM126 billion of revived projects, that distinction is the whole game.
Frequently asked questions
Does on-chain verification replace TEDUH or the KPKT registration process?
No, and we wouldn’t recommend treating it that way. TEDUH and the underlying HIMS system are the authoritative legal sources for developer licensing, APDL status, project approval, and blacklist information. Every buyer should still check TEDUH before paying any booking fee, and every developer must remain in full compliance with KPKT registration and eSPA requirements (mandatory from 1 January 2026). Voluntary verification is purely additive — it publishes the information that TEDUH was never designed to capture, such as beneficial ownership, project-level financial attestations, and real-time milestone updates between KPKT reporting cycles. The two layers complement each other; one without the other is incomplete.
Why would a developer choose to publish more than the law requires?
For the same reason public companies publish governance reports beyond what listing rules require: voluntary transparency is a costly-to-fake signal. The 73% of housing-project abandonments that originate in financial issues (KPKT / REHDA Institute, April 2025) is exactly what buyers most want to evaluate before committing. Developers who can demonstrate financial discipline through independent attestation — anchored on a public blockchain — close that information gap faster than any marketing campaign can. The commercial result is shorter buyer due diligence, higher conversion at the booking stage, stronger pricing, and a brand position that compounds across future launches.
What does the proposed Real Property Development Bill mean for verification?
The Real Property Development Bill is intended to replace the existing HDA 1966 framework and is expected to extend statutory protection to commercial-property buyers (such as SoHo and office units) who currently sit outside the residential HDA regime (KPKT / The Edge Malaysia, January–May 2026). It will also formalise mechanisms KPKT has been signalling for years — escrow accounts, an Option to Purchase clause, stricter audit. Voluntary verification is not in tension with any of this. If anything, the Bill’s direction makes verification more valuable in the interim, because developers who already operate at the higher standard will find compliance with the new law straightforward and will have a multi-year head start on the trust positioning.
How much does verification actually cost a developer?
The on-chain transaction cost is trivial — Polygon’s Layer 2 network charges roughly USD 0.01 per write, and a typical project verification involves a small number of writes. The real cost is the diligence required to verify a project credibly: matching the developer entity to KPKT records, matching the project’s land title to the Land Office, and (where the developer chooses) commissioning third-party attestations of financial or operational disclosures. This is comparable to engaging a reputable auditor for a piece of corporate disclosure — a manageable cost set against the conversion uplift, faster sales, and brand value verification produces over the life of a project.
What stops a fraudulent developer from minting a fake Verified Owner NFT?
The verification step before minting. The point of the on-chain record is not that the blockchain magically makes data true; it is that the blockchain makes the verification step permanent and auditable. Stellarise’s process matches the developer’s licensed entity against KPKT and the project’s title against the Land Office before any NFT is issued. A developer cannot mint a Verified Owner record for a project they don’t legally control. We explain the full verification workflow in our
Are buyers actually checking this kind of information?
Increasingly, yes — and the trajectory is clear. iProperty Malaysia, PropertyGuru, EdgeProp and several conveyancing firms now treat the TEDUH check as a mandatory first step in any buyer guide (iProperty Malaysia, August 2025; PropertyGuru Malaysia, January 2026). The audience for that advice is growing, and the buyers who follow it are the ones with the strongest balance sheets. They are also the buyers most likely to ask why a project hasn’t published the additional voluntary disclosures that more serious developers are now starting to make. The cost of being one of the last developers to verify is going to rise meaningfully through 2027–2028 as adoption builds.
Sources & References
- KPKT (Ministry of Housing and Local Government). TEDUH portal. Real-time developer licence, APDL, project status, and blacklist data.
- KPKT Special Task Force for Sick and Abandoned Private Housing Projects (TFST), via Scoop. “Govt cuts sick and delayed housing projects by 24% nationwide” (9 December 2025). 1,333 projects revived, RM126.47 billion GDV, 159,638 units; 105 abandoned, 335 sick, 111 delayed as of 31 October 2025.
- KPKT / The Edge Malaysia. “Know Your Stuff: Electronic sales and purchase agreement (eSPA)” (February 2026). Mandatory eSPA from 1 January 2026; HIMS, iDsaya, TEDUH integration.
- REHDA Institute / Universiti Malaya / KPKT. 2025 Abandoned Housing Symposium Report, via The Edge Malaysia (April 2025). 73% of abandonments financial, 12% internal management, 12% development-related. 111,000+ units across 726 projects at end-2024.
- KR Institute. “Abandoned Housing: An Unfinished Dream” (October 2024). 113 abandoned projects, 16,000+ affected buyers.
- KPKT / Focus Malaysia. “KPKT revives abandoned housing projects, sets 2030 target to end issues” (August 2024). Minister Nga Kor Ming on escrow accounts and 2030 target.
- MetProperty. “KPKT Studies OTP Clause to Reduce Sick and Abandoned Housing Projects” (May 2026). Real Property Development Bill and Option to Purchase clause.
- PropertyGuru Malaysia. “Blacklisted Property Developers in Malaysia 2025” (January 2026). 109 blacklisted developers as of April 2025.
- Bright MLS / Drexel University. On/Off MLS Study: An Analysis of On-MLS and Off-MLS Home Sales (2023). 17.5% verified-listing price premium across 1M+ transactions.
- Commercial Crime Investigation Department, Royal Malaysia Police, via The Star Malaysia. “A market for property scams” (19 January 2026). Property scam losses RM 5.1M in 2025, up 20× from 2023.
- Polygon Labs. Real-World Asset Tokenization. Layer 2 transaction economics.
- Housing Development (Control and Licensing) Act 1966 (Act 118), Malaysia. The current statutory framework being reformed by the proposed Real Property Development Bill.
