A buyer’s gazette,
honest about its biases.

N° 01 — Who writes this

Six years valuing property, then I quit

I’m Ammar Tan. I spent six years as a registered property valuer at a mid-sized firm in Petaling Jaya. The work was fine. The thing that wore me out was the same conversation, three or four times a year, with first-time buyers who’d signed something they didn’t understand: a developer SPA they hadn’t read, an MRTA they didn’t need, a loan margin they couldn’t actually afford after stamp duty.

The fixes were always the same fixes. The questions were always the same questions. Nobody had written it down anywhere a normal person would find it. So I quit, started doing buyer’s representation independently, and started writing the dossiers I wished I could send people instead of explaining the same thing on a Saturday call.

How I make money (and don’t)

I do not take referral fees from developers, banks, insurance agents or contractors. Not from any of them. The reason is selfish: the moment I do, I have to stop writing honestly about MRTA, end-financing traps, or which developers slow-roll defect claims, and the whole dossier becomes useless.

I make money in two ways: (a) one-on-one buyer’s representation when readers want a paid second opinion before signing, and (b) a small monthly subscription tier with quarterly market notes. Both are listed on the contact page. Neither shows up as advertising or affiliate links inside the dossiers.

The editorial method

Every file follows the same shape:

• It starts from a question I’ve been asked at least three times by paying clients.
• The numbers are real — either from a public source (BNM, JPPH, Inland Revenue, Bursa filings) or from sample documents readers and clients have shared with their permission.
• If the law is unsettled or my interpretation is contested, I say so in the file rather than presenting a clean answer.
• If a reader sends evidence I got something wrong, the file is corrected and the change is logged at the top.
• Files are reviewed at least every six months — or immediately when Budget night, BNM circulars or major court decisions move the ground.

What I won’t cover

Property selection. Which area to buy in, which developer is hot, whether to flip the unit — not the job of this dossier. There are entire portals for that, mostly funded by the developers themselves.

Investment yield maths. If you’re buying for yield rather than to live in, the questions are different and the regulatory frame is different. Out of scope.

Property law beyond the everyday. Caveat lifting, court orders, contested estates — see a litigation lawyer, not a gazette.

On naming a single fit-out studio

Most of this site is deliberately neutral on contractors. Recommending one in the wrong file (a loan article, a VP article, a stamp duty article) is exactly the kind of thing that turns a useful publication into a backlink scheme. So I don’t.

Where I do reference one specific firm — a Shah Alam design-and-build studio called binaplusdesign.my — it’s only inside the fit-out cluster, and it’s only because they publish itemised rates, which is the only condition under which I’m comfortable pointing a first-time owner at any single contractor. They don’t pay me. If they ever start, this paragraph will say so first.

You can read every dossier on this site without ever clicking that link, and you’ll lose nothing. That’s the test I keep applying to it.

If you find an error

Email it. Photograph the document. Tell me what your conveyancer or banker actually said. I’d rather correct a dossier in a week than be the third Google result that misled people for two years. Contact details are here.