FACTORS INFLUENCING HOUSE BUYER’S DECISION IN MALAYSIA. CASE STUDY: SEPANG, SELANGOR

Abstract

Housing is a basic human need as explained in the Maslow hierarchy needs. Having a house is a very important entity in ensuring a sense of security for each individual and family. Deciding on buying a house is a crucial decision since housing expenses involved a large amount of cost in individual monthly expenses. Furthermore, the homeownership rate in Malaysia as reported by the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) in 2019 didn’t increase significantly. Thus, the government and house developers need to identify the important factors that influence the house buying decision-making to increase the homeownership rate in Malaysia.   This study investigates the factors influencing housing buying decisions and the difference in factors influencing different income groups in Sepang, Selangor. This study measures the internal factors and external factors influencing house-buying decisions. The internal factors measure the income, stage of life cycle, employment and education subfactors. The external factors measure the financial and economic condition, house price, location, neighbourhood, house type and design and also government housing incentives. A mixed method was applied in this study by interviewing real estate experts and also a survey of 184 respondents in the case study area. Using transcribe method and analysing of the survey data with descriptive and inferential analyses to study the influencing factors. The real estate expert and respondents agreed all the factors were influencing house buying decisions except for education. The importance of the factors is also different among the income groups. For internal factors, all income groups agree that income is the most influential factor followed by employment, stage of life cycle and education. The importance of external factors is different among the groups.