How the RTS Link Is Reshaping Johor Bahru Property

A four-kilometre rail line is about to shrink one of the world's busiest border crossings to a five-minute ride — and property demand in Johor has been moving well ahead of the first train.

By the Stone Group Development advisory desk · 3 July 2026 · 4 min read

What the RTS Link actually is

The Johor Bahru–Singapore Rapid Transit System connects Bukit Chagar, beside the JB customs complex, to Woodlands North on Singapore's Thomson–East Coast Line. The crossing itself takes roughly five minutes. At peak times trains are planned to run about every 3.6 minutes, moving up to 10,000 passengers per hour in each direction — capacity designed to relieve the chronically congested one-kilometre Causeway. Civil works have been targeted for completion around the end of 2026, with passenger service expected in 2027.

The market moved before the trains did

Infrastructure of this scale rarely waits for its ribbon-cutting to show up in property data. When the RTS reached its 50% completion milestone on the Singapore side in April 2023, PropertyGuru's demand index for Johor property jumped 17% in a single month. Johor's residential overhang — long the state's weak point — fell 19.6% in 2023 to 4,228 units, and the state led Malaysia's House Price Index that year with 6.2% annual growth, ahead of Penang, Selangor and Kuala Lumpur (NAPIC data).

Around the Bukit Chagar station itself, the effect is starkest: several nearby projects now ask RM1,000 to RM1,300 per square foot — pricing comparable to central Kuala Lumpur condominiums. Market analyses of the corridor consistently point to a 20–30% price uplift in areas positioned along the route since the project became credible.

Who is actually buying

Two buyer groups dominate. The first is Malaysians who work in Singapore and want to swap a punishing daily Causeway commute for a short train ride. The second is Singapore residents themselves: after Singapore raised its Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty in April 2023 — 20% on a second property, 30% on a third — Johor became the obvious release valve for investment capital. Media reporting found Singaporeans made up roughly 40% of buyers at one major development beside the future station, and its developer recorded a five-fold jump in transactions in the months after the ABSD hike.

What it means for Medini

Medini, in Iskandar Puteri, is not on the RTS doorstep — and that is precisely the opportunity. City-centre pricing near Bukit Chagar has already re-rated to RM1,000+ per square foot, while Medini offers GreenRE-certified, resort-grade product at a fraction of that entry cost, inside a designated zone where foreign buyers face no minimum purchase price. As the RTS normalises cross-border living and the Johor–Singapore Special Economic Zone channels jobs into Iskandar Puteri, the value gap between the station corridor and Medini is the kind of spread infrastructure cycles tend to close.

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*Published 3 July 2026. Figures are drawn from the third-party sources listed above and from official data (NAPIC) as at the dates cited; they may be revised and are not a prediction of future performance. This article is general information, not investment, legal or tax advice.