The short answer: Bodaiju Residences is a 99-year leasehold serviced apartment in Medini, on a lease running from 28 December 2015 to 27 December 2114, so a buyer in 2026 takes on about 88 years.
Three banks have approved end financing on these terms, and in 2025 the Court of Appeal confirmed the structure is legally valid.
Here is how it actually works, with the awkward parts left in.
What “leased over the parcel” really means
Most Malaysian condominiums sit on land the developer owns, freehold or state leasehold, with a strata title issued to each buyer.
Medini works differently, on purpose. The township itself, and how it is laid out, is a separate subject from the title you take.
It runs on a private lease scheme.
Developer documents reviewed for this guide describe Bodaiju as a 99-year lease over Parcel C11, running from 28 December 2015 to 27 December 2114. These documents do not identify the current registered proprietor of the underlying land title. This guide therefore does not state who owns that underlying title.
The lease runs down a chain: from the landowner to the project developer, and then to you.
So when you buy at Bodaiju, you hold a 99-year lease over the parcel, with a strata title issued under that lease, rather than a freehold.
The term carries an option to extend by a further 30 years, and at the very end the land reverts to the lessor.
This was a deliberate design under the Iskandar development framework, set up in part so that foreign buyers could not own Medini land in perpetuity.
The trade-off is the part that helps you, and we come to it below.
The scare stories, and how they ended
If you have read something worrying about Medini leases, it was almost certainly about the early disputes. They were real, and we would rather you hear them from us.
At one project, Meridin@Medini, 107 buyers sued their developer, and in 2020 the High Court declared their sale agreements invalid.
At another, Iskandar Residences, 63 buyers said they had believed they were getting ordinary strata ownership, and found they held lease rights instead.
That is where the caution comes from.
Here is how the law now stands.
In April 2025 the Court of Appeal reversed the Meridin ruling, in Tropika Istimewa Development Sdn Bhd v Wong Hang Fah.
It held that the sale agreements, and the strata titles issued under Medini’s long-term lease, are valid, and do not breach the National Land Code or the Strata Titles Act.
We will be straight about what that does, and does not, mean.
It is a Court of Appeal decision, not a Federal Court one.
It protected buyers and developers who had relied in good faith on the exemptions the authorities granted, and it held that those approvals can only be challenged by a formal judicial review, not re-argued deal by deal.
So the structure now stands on an appellate ruling, not a grey area, but it is not placed beyond all further challenge.
Which is exactly why the last section matters: read your own lease terms, and run a land search, before you sign.
Then the banks voted
Tenure is only as good as a bank’s willingness to lend against it.
As at January 2026, three banks have approved end financing for Bodaiju: Bank Islam, Bank Muamalat and RHB, with Affin Bank, Public Bank and CIMB pending.
A lender putting its own money against a title, after its own legal check, is the most honest signal you will get that the lease is bankable.
- Bank Islam
- Bank Muamalat
- RHB
Each one ran its own legal check on the title first.
- Affin Bank
- Public Bank
- CIMB
Pending is not refused. It means no decision has been published.
What ~88 years is worth over time
A long lease is not a short one, and it does not lose value evenly.
A fresh 99-year lease is close to freehold, and it decays slowly at first.
As a directional guide, the Singapore benchmark valuers use (Bala’s Table) puts a 99-year lease at about 96% of freehold value, around 80% with 60 years left, and about 60% at 30 years left.
Bodaiju’s ~88 years sits at the gentle, top end of that curve.
It is a Singapore benchmark, not a Malaysian pricing formula, so treat it as direction, not a number.
That ~88 years is also longer than many established leasehold condos in Johor Bahru and Singapore, where 1990s estates now carry only 60 to 70 years.
What the lease does to a resale is a separate question from what it does to value on paper, and the tax and the buyer pool decide more of it than the curve does. Both are set out in what selling a Medini apartment again really costs a foreigner.
Why Medini structured it this way
In exchange for the leasehold structure, Medini carries incentives that ordinary Johor land does not:
- Open to any nationality, with no Bumiputera quota.
- The minimum purchase price is the open question. Elsewhere in Johor, foreign buyers face a RM1 million floor. Johor separately prices a state approval for serviced apartments sold under it, so that category exists. What nobody has produced is a document naming Medini, or one particular unit, inside it.
The market treats the second point as settled for the whole zone, and IRDA is usually named as its source. We have not seen an official text that covers every Medini property, so treat it as unit-specific and ask the developer to confirm your unit in writing before you commit.
The rest of what a Singapore-based buyer needs before viewing is in a Singapore buyer’s guide to Bodaiju Medini.
The serviced-apartment title is also what makes nightly letting possible here, where an ordinary residential strata scheme often would not, and owners can run the numbers on the short-term rental page. Whether that beats a twelve-month tenancy is a separate question, answered on public data in short-term rental versus long-term rental in Johor.
The one step every foreign buyer still takes
The RM1 million minimum purchase price may not apply to your unit.
State consent is not waived either way.
Every foreign purchase in Malaysia needs the state’s consent under the National Land Code, and Medini is no exception.
What Medini changes is the price floor, not the paperwork: the application is still made, still decided, and still paid for.
At Bodaiju’s prices it is decided by the Director of Lands and Mines Johor, who holds the approving power up to RM10 million, rather than by the State Authority.
Once approved, the fee falls due within thirty days of the approval letter, and the approval itself has a shelf life, so the transfer has to be registered inside that window or the application starts again.
The consent, the stamp duty and everything else that lands with them are priced line by line in what a Bodaiju unit costs, all in, where you can put your own price in and see which of them fall due at signing and which wait for the title.
You still pay foreign-buyer stamp duty, which we walk you through.
The end of the lease, and the freehold question
At the end of the term, the land reverts to IIB, and any renewal is a private, contractual matter — decided on the terms written into the sale agreement, at the landowner’s discretion, not by a public formula.
So the renewal and extension clause in the SPA is one to read closely.
There is also a newer development worth knowing, though not banking on.
In January 2025 The Star reported a conversion arrangement involving a developer in the zone.
That is a news report about one arrangement. No current official source reviewed for this guide confirms a general right or programme to convert Medini private leases into freehold ownership, and none of the material reviewed establishes who holds the underlying land title.
Any possibility would depend on the specific land title, lease documents, registered proprietor and required approvals. Ask for written, property-specific confirmation from the relevant lessor or developer, and have an independent Malaysian property lawyer read it, before relying on any proposed conversion.
Take these to a land search
Everything above can be checked against the register, rather than taken from this page.
The title particulars, from the KPKT-approved brochure: HSD 546583, PTD 200287 (Parcel C 11), Mukim Pulai, Daerah Johor Bahru.
Land category Service Apartment Title, lease running to 27 December 2114, encumbrances recorded as none.
Any Johor conveyancing lawyer can run a land search on those numbers. Three things are worth asking them to read in the SPA before you commit:
- the exact lease term, and how the title is assigned on resale;
- the renewal and extension terms, and any premium formula;
- whether any conversion is proposed for your unit, on what documented basis, and by whom.
The development’s licence itself is public, at teduh.kpkt.gov.my under developer licence 30949/01-2030/0005 (N).
Where this leaves a buyer
Medini’s tenure is not freehold, and we will not dress it up as freehold.
It is a 99-year private lease, now backed by an appellate court, lent against by three banks, and checkable line by line against the public register.
For most buyers, the reason to accept that structure is the same reason it exists. Medini was drawn up to pull in foreign capital, and the leasehold is part of what that arrangement bought.
Planning a visit? Book a private viewing and we will walk the tenure documents with you, page by page.