Short answer. As at 27 August 2026, no rule published by the council, the state or the federal government prohibits letting a Medini serviced apartment by the night.
That is not the same as “anything goes”.
Permission here is not one law but a stack of five layers, and the only layer that has ever produced a ban that stuck, anywhere in Malaysia, is the one at the bottom: a building’s own house rules.
How nightly letting works at Bodaiju is its own page.
This one is about the rules, layer by layer, each from its own document.
Five layers decide, and only one has ever said no
| Layer | Who holds the pen | What is published for Medini |
|---|---|---|
| Land use | The title category | Bodaiju sits on a Service Apartment title, the commercial category nightly letting starts from |
| Council | MBIP | A licence schedule that prices lodging houses and hotels, and names no short-stay category |
| State | Johor | Nothing found by our cut-off date |
| Federal | KPKT and MOTAC | A guideline in draft since 2019 and an Act amendment in progress, neither in force |
| Building | The future management body | Does not exist yet at Bodaiju. Elsewhere, the one layer that has banned short stays and won in court |
The rest of this article walks the stack from the council down, because the council is the layer an answer engine, a portal or a WhatsApp forward is most likely to have wrong.
The council: MBIP licenses lodging, and names no short-stay category
Iskandar Puteri’s city council, MBIP, publishes its business licence types and rates as Jadual A under its trades, businesses and industries licensing by-laws of 2018, with rates applied from October 2022.
Licence 71405, “Lesen Rumah Tumpangan/Hotel”, is the accommodation entry.
It prices three things, per unit, stepped by floor area:
- Rumah tumpangan, a lodging house: RM270 to RM400.
- Hotel or resort: RM350 to RM625.
- Rumah rehat, a rest house: RM500 flat.
All three are classed berisiko tinggi, high-risk, the class that carries premises inspection.
What the schedule does not contain is any line for short-term rental, Airbnb, homestay, or a serviced apartment let by the night.
We checked the schedule itself and searched mbip.gov.my for a short-stay guideline or by-law on 27 August 2026, and found none.
Read that absence carefully, because it cuts both ways.
A council that wanted nightly letting stopped would have a line for it.
MBIP has not written one.
But an unnamed category is not an exemption.
It means the council has not published where a nightly-let serviced apartment sits, and the only reliable way to close that gap is to ask MBIP’s licensing department in writing which category, if any, applies to your unit today.
That question costs a letter.
The state: Johor publishes nothing, while other states move
We found no Johor state enactment, rule or guideline governing short-term rental accommodation, checking the state and council sources above, PLANMalaysia Johor’s published planning guidelines, and news coverage, as at 27 August 2026.
Other states show what the layer looks like when it wakes up.
Selangor’s state assembly record shows a government formally examining short-stay controls for modified terrace houses, and waiting on the same federal guideline everyone else is.
So the honest reading of Johor today is silence, not permission.
Silence can end, and when it does it will most likely end through the federal framework below, which is being built precisely as the uniform reference for states and councils.
The federal layer: drafted since 2019, still not in force
The federal government has been drafting a national short-stay framework for seven years.
The 2019 public consultation draft of the Guideline on Short-Term Residential Accommodation, produced by a working group under the housing ministry, proposed:
- Host registration through the local authority, which for Medini means MBIP.
- Licensing of the platforms themselves.
- Night caps for residential property, a proposed 90 to 180 nights a year for un-hosted residential units, with councils holding the discretion to raise them. For commercial-titled property, the category Bodaiju sits in, the draft proposed no night cap.
- For strata property, compliance with the building’s own rules under section 70 of the Strata Management Act 2013.
It named commercial-titled serviced apartments, the category Bodaiju sits in, as a covered property type.
That draft closed its consultation in November 2019 and never came into force.
The current push is larger. In July 2025 the tourism ministry said an amendment to the Tourism Industry Act 1992 was headed for Parliament, and that the housing and tourism ministries had agreed the sequence: an STRA premises obtains a business licence from its local authority first, then registers as tourism premises.
By August 2025 the planning guideline was described as completed, awaiting Cabinet and the National Council for Local Government.
As at 27 August 2026, we found no announcement that either the guideline or the amendment has come into force.
Two things follow for a Medini owner.
First, the drafted direction is register-and-license, not prohibit.
Second, every version of the framework routes through the council counter, which is why the MBIP question above is the one worth asking in writing now.
The building: the only ban that has stuck
While governments drafted, the one short-stay prohibition tested all the way up Malaysia’s courts came from a building.
In Innab Salil & Ors v Verve Suites Mont’ Kiara Management Corporation, decided by the Federal Court on 5 October 2020, a management corporation’s house rule prohibiting short-term letting was upheld against a challenge under section 70(5) of the Strata Management Act 2013.
Verve Suites is a serviced-apartment development on commercial title.
The title did not save the operators.
That is the specific holding, and this article does not stretch it further: it does not decide anything about Bodaiju, and it does not make every building’s rules valid.
What it establishes is where the strongest pen in the stack sits.
A building’s owners, by the special resolution the Act requires, can restrict short stays inside their own walls, and the highest court has let that stand.
What this means at Bodaiju
Bodaiju’s management body does not exist yet.
Under the Strata Management Act it forms after completion, which means the building’s house rules are not written today, and cannot be read before they are.
So the position at Bodaiju is the whole stack in miniature:
- The title is the right category, and it is the basis the building is sold on for nightly letting.
- The council, state and federal layers publish nothing against it, as documented above.
- The building layer is unwritten, and it is the one layer with a proven power to say no later.
The step that deals with this costs nothing: before signing, have your lawyer confirm the letting terms in the sale and purchase agreement, in writing.
Whether nightly letting is then worth running is a different question, with numbers on both sides, and a tax treatment of its own.
What we could not verify
Whether MBIP applies its lodging-house category to a strata serviced apartment let by the night. The schedule prices the category; no published MBIP document we found applies or declines to apply it to this case. The written question above is the way to close this, and we state it as open rather than guessing.
The licence period. The schedule states rates without stating the licence term on the face of the table, so this article quotes no annual figure.
Whether the national guideline or the Tourism Industry Act amendment has come into force. The most recent official statements we could open, from July and August 2025, describe both as pending, and our searches to 27 August 2026 found no announcement of either taking effect. If that changed without an announcement we found, the federal section above is the part of this article that ages first.
Whether any unpublished Johor instrument exists. We can only report what the checked sources contain by the cut-off date.
Not finding a document is not the same as the document not existing.
It means the burden sits where it should: on a written answer about your unit, before your plan depends on it.