The Matching Tax: How Fake Listings Create Buyer–Seller Mismatch and Slow Malaysia’s Property Market
ListingMine Academy | Market Efficiency & Structural Insight
Why inaccurate data increases transaction friction, reduces deal velocity, and quietly taxes Malaysia’s entire economy.
Pricing confusion. Phantom supply. Mismatched expectations.
These are not surface-level annoyances—they are the direct mechanical consequences of a market fed by fake listings. And whenever the information layer becomes polluted, the matching process between buyers and sellers collapses into a slow, grinding, high-friction system.
Fake listings don’t just mislead individuals. They slow down the entire property market.
1. Phantom Supply: The Market That Isn’t Real
Fake listings create the illusion of abundant choices—cheap, beautiful, perfectly located units that do not actually exist. This “phantom supply” doesn’t just mislead—it actively suppresses real demand by convincing buyers to wait for deals that will never appear.
Buyers believe there are dozens of “better options.”
Sellers believe they must compete with unrealistic prices.
Agents waste hours handling inquiries for units that were never real.
The result: A market that looks liquid on the surface, but is hollow underneath.
2. Price Expectation Damage: The Gap No One Can Close
Fake prices become psychological anchors.
When buyers expect RM500k because of fake listings, but real sellers expect RM600k, the negotiation gap becomes unbridgeable. This is no longer a price negotiation. It is a reality negotiation. And reality always loses.
3. Buyer Qualification Becomes a Rescue Mission
In a healthy market, qualification means understanding the buyer’s needs and budget. But in a fake-listing market, qualification becomes something much more difficult:
Agents must now spend precious cycles rehabilitating a buyer’s corrupted price expectations—a costly, time-consuming process that should never have been necessary. Instead of moving buyers forward, agents spend hours undoing damage caused by misinformation.
4. Seller Expectations Inflate Beyond Reality
Sellers compare their home to fake listings:
- Higher prices
- Better renovations
- Unrealistic days-on-market
They anchor to these illusions and reject legitimate offers. Their holding time increases. Their frustration increases. The market slows.
5. The Visibility Paradox: More Listings, Fewer Matches
When 50% of listings are unverified:
- Buyers stop believing what they see
- Sellers stop trusting inquiry quality
- Agents stop trusting each other
- Everyone hesitates
More noise does not create more matches. More noise destroys the signal.
6. The Market Breakdown: High Friction, Low Velocity
This is the economic impact of fake listings:
- Transaction costs skyrocket
- Search time multiplies
- Negotiation cycles lengthen
- Deal velocity collapses
- Liquidity evaporates
In economic terms, fake listings create a Matching Tax: A structural penalty applied to every buyer, seller, agent, and bank participating in the ecosystem. A slower market is not just inefficient—it is expensive.
7. Verified Listings: The Market Lubricant
Verified listings act as frictionless infrastructure. They don’t just improve one deal—they increase the throughput of the entire system:
- Real supply matches real demand
- Prices reflect actual market behaviour
- Negotiations start from truth, not fantasy
- Agents collaborate efficiently
- Buyers make faster decisions
- Sellers adjust expectations confidently
- Banks and valuers operate with clarity
A verified data layer doesn’t accelerate one part of the market—it accelerates all of it.
Conclusion: Verification Is the First Step Toward a Functional Market
Malaysia’s real estate market cannot modernise—cannot achieve the liquidity, transparency, and efficiency it needs—until its information layer is clean.
Fake listings slow matching. Slow matching slows deals. Slow deals slow the economy.
Verification is not cosmetic. Verification is infrastructure.
The Matching Tax disappears the moment the truth returns.
