Prospecting housing bubbles in Malaysia

Abstract

There have been extensive studies pertaining on bubble detection in literature, though very few investigate the Malaysian residential property market. The inflated housing market, however, has sparked widespread public anxiety and there has been a proliferation of comments and forecasts about the presence of housing bubbles in Malaysia throughout the last decade. The purpose of this paper is to assess the housing bubbles in Malaysia by using empirical models in detecting Malaysian residential property bubbles. This research employed the Markov Switching (MS) model to investigate the housing bubbles for the Malaysian residential property market. The findings revealed Malaysian housing prices to be relatively stable over the period 2010 to 2019, with states of upheaval occurring only during short-lived periods. Overall, Malaysian housing prices were generally steady between 2010 and 2019, albeit this has shifted slowly in recent years as economic turmoil faded. This study provides empirical results to explain the situation of Malaysian house prices in the recent years.