Forest City is a luxury development in southern Malaysia. China’s largest developer, Country Garden, spent $100 billion building the estate.
I first visited Forest City in May 2022, and it was a ghost town. I found towering apartment buildings spread across four square miles. A white-sand beach overlooked the Johor Strait, where I could see the silhouette of industrial plants in western Singapore. At night, the windows of hundreds of rows of apartments stayed dark. There were barely any cars on the road and only a handful of people at the beach.
Forest City projects that some 700,000 people will live in the estate in the next six years. For now, it says there are only 9,000 residents.
In 2022, a security guard at a local condominium told me 20 people lived in the complex. This left me curious about what it would be like to spend a night in one of these apartments.
In March, eight years into Forest City’s development, I returned to the estate.
I booked a homestay at a condominium unit for 70 Singapore dollars, or $52, through a property manager. Dozens of similar units are listed on Airbnb for as little as $38 a night. The unit’s owner, who is based in China, declined to comment on this story, citing privacy reasons.
Take a look inside one of the thousands of vacant apartments in Forest City.
Country Garden did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Business Insider.
