Malaysia's $100 billion ghost town really wants to draw in tourists. It's not working.

25.03.2024 - 01:45 / insider.com

Wendy Noble lives 15 minutes away from Malaysia's Forest City, across the border in Singapore. One Friday, after a tiring week at graduate school,all the 25-year-old wanted was to lounge by a beach.

A quick scroll through online photos of a pristine beach and luxurious golf resort inspired her and her roommate Ree Nemis to head to Forest City the following day.

Country Garden, the largest developer in China, spent $100 billion building Forest City. The developer promoted it as a "living paradise" meant to house 700,000 people in luxury high-rise condominiums and villas.

The reality turned out to be different. Instead, it's now one of Southeast Asia's most prominent ghost towns. Rows of skyscrapers make way to an empty beach. Roads that stretched for miles didn't have a single car on them. The nearby hotel looked abandoned, with dragonflies breeding in the discolored swimming pool.

"My first impression was that it was quiet and only very few people were there," Noble said.

But Forest City has shown it wants to shed its reputation as a ghost town, writing in a press release in March 2023 that it's a place to experience "coastal resort life" and branding itself as a "popular short-haul tourist destination." Forest City added in the press release that at least 15,000 people had visited its local waterpark from August to September 2022.

"The destination has been attracting not only local travelers but also many tourists coming from afar," Syarul Izam, the vice president of Forest City, said in the press release.

But this hasn't done much to transform its image.

"The locals had a certain look when we said we're going to Forest City," Noble told BI, referring to the people they had met on the way to the development.

"It seemed like a nice place to live, so at the time, it didn't make sense to me why no one lived there," Nemis said, adding that she later noticed that the few facilities it had weren't well-maintained as no one appeared to use them.

In recent months, the development has held several events, including golf tournaments and triathlons, to draw visitors.

At first glance, the few thousand visitors to Forest City may not seem significant. Johor — the Malaysian state where the estate is located — received more than 16.6 million tourists last year, per data from Johor's tourism agency.

Still, it points to significant growth in Forest City's tourism sector, Adilah Zain, a professor of tourism at MARA Technological University in Malaysia, told Business Insider.

"Forest City is able to attract the weekend tourists," Adilah said, referring to tourists like Noble and Nemis.

In 2022, one expert familiar with Johor's real estate market told BI that only several thousand people were living in Forest City. In