Its managing director Jauhari Hamidi told The Sun: “The market is bad as it is. We finished our last financial year which ended in June and we had to do some real innovative stuff in trying to make sure we met our budget.

“Purely based on property development, I don’t think any of the property developers met their budget because the market is so soft.”

While take-up rates used to be as high as 70-80% on launch day, Jauhari said, this only happened for selected launches today.

“We expect next year to be soft also. It may start to pick up towards the end of 2017 or in early 2018. It is going to be challenging and everyone will have to look at their launch programme and products,” The Sun quoted him as saying.

Jauhari said in the past, his company would issue contracts worth about RM1.5 billion to RM2 billion for all the launches they had, but now they were issuing only about RM1 billion worth of contracts, becoming more selective.

“Now, we are holding back. The cake gets smaller and the pool of contractors that we have also will have to fight among themselves.

“When times are good, you start growing but when times are not so good, your overhead gets higher, so you have to rationalise, do optimisation and so on,” he added.

He noted that having 23 ongoing township developments provided some room for it to manoeuvre in terms of selecting which products to launch, adding that it they could not stop launching as otherwise they would have no products to sell in two to three years.

He revealed that for the financial year ending June 30, 2017, the group had planned about 50 property launches.

However due to the subdued market, this has been scaled back to about 30 launches with a gross development value of about RM2 billion.

Despite the market conditions, Jauhari said the company had several exciting projects in the pipeline.