Nobody teaches you how to buy a house, so I built a game

By the PropertyForFun creator. Published 29 August 2026. Malaysian writing for Malaysian.

Buying a house is the biggest thing most Malaysians will ever pay for. It is also the one big decision nobody prepares us for.

You finish school, you finish uni, you start working. Nobody sat you down and explained DSR, or what a valuation shortfall does to your cash, or why the maintenance fee matters more than the swimming pool. So when the time comes, you ask your family, or you ask the agent standing in the sales gallery. One of them loves you. The other one is paid when you sign.

Then you commit to six figures of debt and start learning on the job.

To be fair, it is not only debt. You get a roof, you get somewhere to come home to, and you get an asset. That part is real. But a slightly better decision at the start is worth a lot of money and a lot of weekends.

I made the mistakes too

Six years ago I bought my first property. I am not going to pretend I did it well.

I could have picked a better area. I could have picked something that actually fitted how I live, instead of something that looked good on a floor plan. Nothing catastrophic happened. It is just that I paid for lessons I could have read about for free, if anyone had written them down in plain language.

That is the whole reason this game exists.

What the game covers

Money is only part of it. Plenty of calculators will tell you a monthly instalment. Very few tell you what to actually look at before you sign.

• How to work out what you can borrow, and separately, what you can comfortably carry
• How to judge an area, not just a unit
• Landed or high rise, and how many rooms you will really need in five years
• Amenities that matter every day, versus the ones in the brochure
• Freehold and leasehold, and when the tenure actually costs you
• Buying subsale, and the checks people skip
• And the one almost nobody thinks about, your exit plan

That last one is the part I care about most. Everyone plans how to get in. Almost nobody plans how to get out, and that is usually where the money is lost.

Where the numbers came from

I did not make this up on a weekend. The formulas and the advice inside come from interviews I ran with property writers, with valuers and building managers working in real estate industry every day, and with researchers at an international real estate firm. Some of it comes from getting it wrong myself.

Where sources disagreed, I picked one answer and said so. Where the popular answer was out of date, I used the current one, even when that meant contradicting guides that a lot of people still quote.

It is free, and it stays free

Fifteen minutes, no sign up, no phone number, nothing to buy at the end. English, Malay and Chinese, because your first house is hard enough without doing it in your second language.

Play it, argue with it, then go and view a few places. That is the point.

Common questions

Who made the First Home game?

It was built by the creator of Property For Fun, a Malaysian who bought a first property six years ago and wanted to save others from the same avoidable mistakes. It is independent and not affiliated with any developer, agency or bank.

Is the First Home game free?

Yes. It is completely free, needs no sign up, asks for no phone number or email, and there is nothing to buy at the end. It takes about 15 minutes and is available in English, Malay and Chinese.

What does the game teach?

How much you can borrow and how much you can comfortably carry, how to judge an area rather than just a unit, landed versus high rise, how many rooms you will need later, amenities, freehold and leasehold, what to check when buying subsale, and how to plan your exit before you buy.

Is this financial advice?

No. It is an education and entertainment project. It explains how the numbers work so you can run your own, but you should check anything important with your own bank and a qualified professional before you commit.