Three companies employ 29% of Malaysia's property negotiators

Nobody seems to have counted this before, so we did.

On 9 October 2026 we pulled the complete public register of Malaysia’s property profession from LPEPH (the Board of Valuers, Appraisers, Estate Agents and Property Managers): 1,851 licensed firms and 38,569 registered negotiators. Then we joined the two and counted.

The picture that came out is not the one the industry describes about itself. Malaysian property agency is usually talked about as a cottage industry of small independent firms. By headcount, it is one of the most concentrated professional services markets in the country.

Every figure below is a count from the public register. Method, caveats and what we deliberately did not publish are at the bottom.

Key findings

• Malaysia has 1,851 licensed property firms and 38,569 registered negotiators (RENs), of whom 34,193 hold an active licence.
• The three largest groups employ 29.0% of all active negotiators. The top 20 employ 54.3%. The top 50 employ 71.0%.
• IQI Realty is the largest, with 4,721 active negotiators across 30 branch licences - roughly one in every seven licensed negotiators in Malaysia.
• The median registered office has 17.5 active negotiators; the mean is 38. 26 offices (2.9%) hold 32.3% of the entire profession.
• Kuala Lumpur and Selangor together hold 61.7% of all active negotiators. Adding Johor brings it to 75.8%.
• 54% of all licensed property firms in Malaysia registered in 2020 or later. The median firm commenced in 2020.
• 11.3% of negotiator licences on the register are expired, not active.
• More firms list a fax number (54%) than a website (17%).

All figures counted from the LPEPH public register on 9 October 2026. Method and limits at the bottom.

1. The concentration

Of the 38,569 negotiators on the register, 34,193 hold an active licence. Here is where they actually work:

Twenty companies employ more than half of every licensed property negotiator in Malaysia. Fifty of them employ seven in ten.

The ten largest, by active negotiators:

IQI on its own accounts for roughly one in every seven licensed negotiators in the country.

This only becomes visible if you roll branches into their parent. LPEPH issues each branch its own registration number as a suffix of the parent’s - E (1) 1584 is IQI’s head office, E (1) 1584/3 and E (1) 1584/9 are branches. Count registration numbers and IQI looks like thirty separate firms of 150 people. Count groups and it’s one firm of 4,721.

2. The barbell

Firm sizes are not distributed the way you would guess. Taking the 900 registered offices that have at least one active negotiator:

Median office: 17.5 negotiators. Mean: 38. When the mean is more than double the median, you are looking at a long tail doing the heavy lifting - and here 2.9% of offices hold a third of the profession.

Meanwhile a quarter of all offices have fewer than five negotiators, and between them they account for 1.4% of the industry’s people.

3. Half the register has nobody in it

This was the biggest surprise, and it needs two numbers rather than one.

951 of the 1,851 registration numbers - 51% - have no active negotiator attached to that specific number. But some of those are branch offices of groups that have plenty of negotiators elsewhere. Rolling branches into their parent, 726 registrations - 39% - belong to a group with no active negotiator anywhere at all.

That isn’t a data error. It breaks down sensibly once you look at licence type: of those 726, 313 are property-management firms, 97 are pure valuation practices and 65 are classed “Non Firm” - none of which employ negotiators by nature.

But 231 of them hold an estate-agency licence and still have zero negotiators. Among estate-agency-licensed firms specifically, 1,125 of 1,356 (83%) have at least one; the remaining 231 are either licensed estate agents working alone, or dormant registrations nobody has surrendered.

4. Two states are the industry

Kuala Lumpur and Selangor together hold 61.7% of Malaysia’s licensed negotiators across two adjacent states. Add Johor and you have 75.8% of the profession in three.

Perlis has seven.

5. The industry is mostly new

Of the 1,617 firms with a commencement date on file:

54% of every licensed property firm in Malaysia was registered in 2020 or later. The median firm commenced in 2020. The oldest on the register dates to 1974.

Whatever happened to Malaysian property between 2020 and now, it roughly doubled the number of licensed firms in six years.

6. 11% of licences have lapsed

4,376 of the 38,569 negotiator records - 11.3% - are expired rather than active. Of the active ones, 33,455 run to 2026 and 738 to 2027.

Worth knowing if you are verifying an agent: a name appearing on the register is not the same as a current licence, and roughly one record in nine is stale.

7. More firms have a fax number than a website

And of the firms that list an email, 56% use a free mailbox - Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail - rather than an address at their own domain.

One more: 61% of active negotiators are registered under a working name that differs from their legal name. If you are matching agent records across systems, that is the single thing most likely to break your join.

Questions this data answers

How many property agents are there in Malaysia? 38,569 negotiators are on the LPEPH register, of whom 34,193 hold an active licence as of 9 October 2026. A further 1,851 licensed firms sit above them.

Which is the biggest property agency in Malaysia? IQI Realty, with 4,721 active registered negotiators across 30 branch licences - about one in seven of every licensed negotiator in the country. The Roof Realty is second with 3,160, and PropNex Realty third with 2,034.

How concentrated is Malaysia’s property agency industry? Highly. The top 3 groups hold 29.0% of all active negotiators, the top 20 hold 54.3%, and the top 50 hold 71.0%. For comparison, in Singapore the top three agencies hold 76.7% of registered salespersons.

How big is a typical Malaysian property agency? The median registered office has 17.5 active negotiators and the mean is 38 - a gap that tells you the distribution is skewed. A quarter of offices have fewer than five negotiators and account for 1.4% of the profession, while 26 offices have 200 or more and account for 32.3%.

Where are Malaysia’s property agents based? Kuala Lumpur (10,755 active negotiators) and Selangor (10,349) hold 61.7% between them. Johor adds 4,802. The three states together hold 75.8% of the profession. Perlis has seven.

How do I check if a Malaysian property agent is licensed? Search the LPEPH Board Information System at bis.lpeph.gov.my/search, which is linked from the LPEPH website. Note that 11.3% of the negotiator records on the register are expired rather than active, so check the status, not just that a name appears.

Is the Malaysian property agency industry growing? By firm count, sharply. 881 of the 1,617 firms with a commencement date on file registered in the 2020s, against 587 in the whole of the 2010s. 54% of licensed firms are five years old or younger.

Method, and what we did not publish

Source. The LPEPH Board Information System public register at bis.lpeph.gov.my/search, the same search any member of the public can run from the LPEPH website. Pulled 9 October 2026. Only the public search was used; nothing behind a login was accessed.

Note the domain: lppeh.gov.my is the old address and now serves only a maintenance notice. The live register is lpeph.gov.my.

Counting. Negotiator records were de-duplicated on the register’s own record ID before counting - 38,580 raw rows resolved to 38,569 unique people. Unless stated otherwise, every figure counts active licences only; expired ones are reported separately in section 6.

Grouping. Branches were rolled into their parent by taking the registration number before the /. We checked this: of the 187 registration numbers that have branches, 127 carry an identical firm name across every branch, and the 60 that differ are regional variants of the same brand (ACEAKL ESTATE AGENCY and ACEAKL ESTATE AGENCY (SOUTH), or AZMI & CO (BANGI) and AZMI & CO (JOHOR)). The grouping is an inference from the register’s own numbering, and we think it’s a sound one, but it is an inference.

Known limits. 15 active negotiators carry no firm registration number, so group percentages are computed over 34,178 rather than 34,193. 234 firms have no commencement date on file and are excluded from section 5 only. The register reflects licensing, not activity - a licensed negotiator is not necessarily a practising one.

What we did not publish, deliberately. The register also carries every negotiator’s full name and personal mobile number. We have not published those, will not, and did not use them for anything. The register exists so the public can verify that an agent is licensed - not so vendors can build a calling list. Everything above is aggregate statistics, and every individual figure here could be reconstructed by anyone willing to do the same counting.

Corrections. If you run a firm on this register and a number here looks wrong, tell us and we’ll check it against the source and republish.

We’re Coqnit. We build software for property agents, which is why we were counting agencies in the first place. We’ve done the same for Singapore, and we publish the findings whether or not they’re convenient for us.