Come and ask the difficult questions on 12 September

For most people this starts as one thing and becomes the other, and you rarely know in advance which way round. Someone buys at 52 intending to rent it out and is spending three months a year there by 60. Someone buys intending to retire and their circumstances change, so it stays let.

Both versions work in Penang, because the industry and the livability are not competing for the same ground.

Anthony Liew, President of the MM2H Association, will explain the current framework: what each tier requires, how long it takes, where applications stall. Dato Lily Tan, Group CEO of Sales and Marketing at Hunza Group, will present SENZE@PICC and take questions on the buying process for Singaporeans.

Saturday 12 September 2026 Hilton Hotel, Mahogany I & II (Level 5) 333 Orchard Road, Singapore 238867 Doors 10:00am to 5:00pm. Seminar 2:00pm to 3:30pm.

Free entry, seats limited. Bring the hard questions. That is what the session is for.

RSVP Now

Introducing the new epicentre for commerce, Penang International Commercial City (PICC) (Source: Hunza Properties Berhad)

Most overseas property forces a choice. Penang does not.

Buy somewhere lovely to live and the value usually sits still, because the place is lovely precisely on account of nothing much happening there. Buy somewhere the money is moving and it is rarely anywhere you would want to spend a Tuesday.

Singaporeans looking at Malaysia hit this constantly. It is why so many stall in the research stage for years. They cannot work out which of the two things they are buying, so they buy neither.

Penang is an unusual case. What makes it a good place to live and what makes it a working property market come from completely different sources. Neither depends on the other, and neither has to be sacrificed for the other.

Penang’s economy runs on semiconductors, not tourists

Ask most Singaporeans about Penang and you get char kway teow and Georgetown. True, and not the point.

Penang is Malaysia’s second smallest state and its fifth largest economy. Intel has committed RM30 billion. Infineon another RM30 billion. TF-AMD RM2 billion and roughly 3,000 jobs. AIXTRON arrived with around 450 skilled roles in phase one. ARM signed a partnership aimed at moving the country up the value chain.

Malaysia is now the world’s sixth largest semiconductor testing and packaging hub, handling about 13% of the global market, and Penang is the centre of it. More importantly, the work is shifting from assembly to advanced packaging and chip design. Assembly means production lines. Design means engineers, on several times the salary.

Most of it sits in the Bayan Lepas Free Industrial Zone in the island’s southwest: 350-plus multinationals, 6,500 SMEs, and around 25,000 new jobs in the pipeline.

The healthcare alone would justify a second home there

Malaysia has overtaken Singapore and India to rank first globally in medical tourism, drawing roughly 1.84 million medical travellers in 2025. Penang accounts for 45% of the national revenue, more than any other state.

The island has nine private hospitals, several internationally accredited, with staff who speak English and Mandarin as standard. Published cost ranges put a knee replacement at under half the Singapore figure and IVF at closer to a fifth, though actual costs vary by hospital and case.

And it is 90 minutes from Changi. Your children can visit for a weekend without taking leave. If something goes wrong at home, you are back the same day.

Your tenant and your neighbour are the same person

This is the part that ties it together.

In Bayan Lepas, the rental pool is engineers, medical travellers, international school families and returning Malaysians. People on good incomes who need somewhere decent to live, near good hospitals and an airport.

Those are the same conditions that make a place pleasant to retire into.

That is not true everywhere. Plenty of high-yield markets are high-yield because tenants are transient and buildings are cheap. Plenty of pleasant retirement towns have no rental market because nobody works there. Bayan Lepas leads Penang Island on rental yield, and it does so for reasons a resident would also welcome.

The infrastructure is arriving in one compressed window

Penang International Airport is expanding from 6.5 million to 12 million annual passengers. The LRT Mutiara Line will run 22 stations across 29.67 km, at four-minute frequencies initially and two minutes at full operation. Silicon Island is reclaiming land beside the industrial zone. Road works are underway to support all of it.

Rail is the one to watch. The pattern across comparable Asian markets is that values near new stations move as completion becomes certain, not after the line opens.

The southwest is where this is concentrated, for a structural reason: the mature northeast around Georgetown is constrained by UNESCO protection and has limited room to build.

Holding a Penang apartment costs about what one Singapore holiday does

Malaysia’s settings for foreign buyers are unusually relaxed. No vacant property tax. No limit on how many properties you can own. Freehold title available, which is worth pausing on if you have spent your life with a 99-year clock running.

Running costs, converted at roughly 1 MYR to 0.32 SGD:

On exit, Real Property Gains Tax runs at 30% within five years and 10% after. Foreign-owned units also carry a three-year non-transferable period. This is a market that rewards patience and penalises flipping. If your horizon is two years, the tax structure alone should stop you.

Developers marketing overseas often absorb the legal fees, the state consent application and the 3% foreign purchaser levy. Get exactly what is included in writing before committing.

Singaporeans buy first and deal with the visa later

You do not need a visa to buy. Foreigners can purchase without any long-stay permit. Malaysia My Second Home exists for people who want to live there for extended periods.

The numbers reveal something useful. As of April 2026, Singapore ranked fourth on MM2H applications with 176 principal applicants. Yet on property transactions, Singapore ranked second with 320 purchases. Chinese buyers submitted more than twelve times as many MM2H applications for a broadly similar number of purchases.

The explanation is geography. A buyer from Beijing needs a long-stay visa for the property to be usable. A buyer from Singapore does not.

Which is the whole argument of this article. The decision to buy and the decision to move can be years apart.

MM2H has been revised, paused and restructured into tiers, so verify current requirements with MOTAC or a licensed agent rather than trusting anything you read online, including this.

Senze@PICC is a major freehold, fully furnished serviced residence development located within the Penang International Commercial City (PICC) in Bayan Lepas, Penang (Source: Hunza Properties Berhad)

SENZE@PICC sits at the point where all of this meets

Penang International Commercial City is a freehold mixed development in Bayan Lepas, connected to LRT Station S09 by shaded link bridges.

Phase 1A, Muze@PICC, completed in August 2023. Phase 2B, SENZE@PICC, is the current release: 1,680 fully furnished serviced residences across three towers, 657 to 1,561 sq ft, smart home systems standard, with completion expected in Q4 2026. All three towers were topped out as of June 2025.

Phase 2A adds a 1.8 million sq ft mall, a 500,000 sq ft office tower and a 230-room hotel. Phase 3 is earmarked for a medical centre.

The buyer mix across PICC runs roughly 70% local. A development with genuine domestic demand behind it behaves differently from one sold almost entirely to foreigners.

Hunza Properties Group has built in Penang for 48 years and delivered more than 18,000 units.

A dual-key unit is the literal answer to this question

Among the SENZE layouts are four dual-key configurations, 1,302 to 1,604 sq ft. One title, two self-contained residences, separate entrances.

Live in one side and rent the other. Or rent both now and move into one later.

It is a building-level answer to the retirement-or-investment question, and it exists because enough buyers were asking it.

The risks are real and worth naming before you go further

Your return is in ringgit and your life is in Singapore dollars, and a decade of adverse currency movement can erase a decent gain. The tenant pool is tied heavily to one cyclical industry. Resale takes longer than it does here, and the buyer pool for a foreign-owned unit is narrower. MM2H rules have changed before and can change again. Construction dates slip.

What you can actually check is the developer’s completion record and the physical stage of the building. A topped-out tower is a materially different proposition from a hole in the ground.

Come and ask the difficult questions on 12 September

For most people this starts as one thing and becomes the other, and you rarely know in advance which way round. Someone buys at 52 intending to rent it out and is spending three months a year there by 60. Someone buys intending to retire and their circumstances change, so it stays let.

Both versions work in Penang, because the industry and the livability are not competing for the same ground.

Anthony Liew, President of the MM2H Association, will explain the current framework: what each tier requires, how long it takes, where applications stall. Dato Lily Tan, Group CEO of Sales and Marketing at Hunza Group, will present SENZE@PICC and take questions on the buying process for Singaporeans.

Saturday 12 September 2026 Hilton Hotel, Mahogany I & II (Level 5) 333 Orchard Road, Singapore 238867 Doors 10:00am to 5:00pm. Seminar 2:00pm to 3:30pm.

Free entry, seats limited. Bring the hard questions. That is what the session is for.

RSVP Now

Figures are drawn from developer materials, the National Property Information Centre, MM2H application data as at 22 April 2026, and the Penang Property Investment Guide 2026. Currency converted at an indicative 1 MYR to 0.32 SGD as at 2 July 2026. All figures are indicative and subject to change. General information only, not financial, legal or tax advice.