The verdict
3.6/ 5The 608-unit count is sizable — entry-level pricing and high unit count means this is a volume/yield product rather than a premium one.
- Price
- from RM342K
- Tenure
- Freehold
- Land title
- Commercial
- Completion
- 2028
Zac’s own rating, not an average of user reviews. It reflects one licensed agent’s assessment of this project against others he tracks in Penang.
Who actually buys a suite across the road from an airport? Not a family, not a retiree, and not — at these prices — a foreign investor. Answer that honestly and Avion Residence gets much easier to judge, because Rackson Group has built a very specific product for a very specific owner, and the building only disappoints the people it was never meant for.
The specifics: 608 serviced suites in a 36-storey tower on Jalan Sultan Azlan Shah, Bayan Lepas, facing Penang International Airport across the road. A Le Meridien hotel shares the tower. Suites run 488 to 1,328 sq ft, pricing starts at RM342,000 for the studio/1-bedroom and reaches roughly RM540,000 for a 3-bedroom, and Rackson's completion date is 2028. Tenure is freehold; the title is commercial.
Key takeaways:
- Avion is a hotel-serviced, airport-fronting short-stay play — that is the product, and it should be priced as one, not as a condo.
- Freehold tenure sits on a commercial title: commercial power and assessment bills, and a leaner bank margin than a residential condo gets.
- Nightly-rate income depends on a management-corporation vote that cannot take place until after 2028 handover.
- From RM342,000 to about RM540,000, the stock is Malaysian and PR territory — it runs under the island's RM1,000,000 foreign threshold.
- Entry at RM342,000 makes it one of the cheapest freehold doors on the island, in a location nobody can replicate.
Built for the transit guest, not the tenant next door
Everything in Avion's design points the same way. A Le Meridien in the same structure, suites that start at 488 sq ft, a two-minute hop to the terminal, and the Bayan Lepas free industrial zone wrapped around it. This is a building that expects its occupants to arrive with a suitcase and leave with one.
That clarity is a strength if you are buying to let. It is a problem if you are buying to live: an airport-fronting tower is busy around the clock, and the things a transit guest likes about it — proximity, movement, hotel bustle — are the things an owner-occupier tires of. Decide which of those two people you are before you look at a floor plan.
Freehold on paper, commercial on the bills
Avion's tenure is freehold, and that is worth having — there is no 99-year countdown. But tenure and title class are separate facts, and the title here is commercial.
In practice that means two things. Your utilities and local assessment are charged at commercial rates. Most banks will lend a smaller proportion of the price than they would on a residential-title condo.
If the plan is to let it out, commercial tariffs are a cost of doing business and you absorb them into the yield. If the plan is to stay, run the electricity bill and the assessment at the commercial rate before you decide the RM342,000 looks cheap. Either way, get your banker's indicative margin on this specific title in hand before signing.
The nightly rate is a hope until the owners vote
Avion's selling story is the short-stay number: a hotel-branded suite by the terminal, turned over nightly at rates a twelve-month tenancy cannot touch.
What that story skips is the rulebook. Penang's Private Homestay Guidelines let a strata building host short-term stays only with a three-quarters special resolution of the management corporation — and Avion's management corporation will not exist until after vacant possession in 2028. No one can tell you today which way that room will vote.
The Le Meridien in the tower makes a yes more plausible than in a standard condo; the whole building is designed around transient stay. But plausible is not settled, and a purchase justified purely on nightly income is a purchase with its foundations poured after the fact. My preference: make the sums work on a twelve-month let to the airport and free-zone workforce — engineers, airline staff, contract managers — and treat the nightly-rate scenario as a bonus if the vote goes through.
RM342,000 is the right price for the wrong passport
Overseas buyers often find this page first, drawn by the airport-rental angle. Penang Island's foreign-buyer floor is RM1,000,000, and Avion's published range ends near RM540,000, so the entire standard stock sits under it. Only a combined or top-floor unit above the floor would open it to a non-Malaysian, and that buyer then carries the 3% state levy, the flat 8% stamp rate and the wait for state consent on top — the foreign-buyer cost breakdown sets all of that out. For the Malaysian or PR investor, the same price is simply an accessible freehold entry in a one-off location.
What tips it one way or the other
Zac's rating: 3.6 / 5. A location Penang cannot reproduce and a coherent hotel-serviced concept, pulled down by the commercial title, an unproven short-let permission, and a setting that suits the investor far better than the resident. Look because of the airport; look carefully because of the title and the vote.
Four things I would settle before offering:
- Written confirmation of the commercial title, passed to your banker for a margin on that basis.
- Rackson's stated position on short-term stays and whatever the draft by-laws say — the developer's stance shapes the eventual owners' vote.
- The maintenance charge per square foot and how hotel-shared facilities are apportioned to owners; shared-facility buildings rarely run cheap.
- A long-let rent assumption that works on its own, with the nightly-rate case kept separate.
Set it next to Maldives Residences and QuayWest Residence, and read the Bayan Lepas area guide for the employment base that drives demand here. The Avion Residence project page holds the current unit mix. If you want a frank read on the short-stay maths or the units still open, message me — and if you do buy to let, I can place the tenant and manage the unit.
Sources: Unit count, storeys, sizes, developer and the Le Meridien mixed-use component per Rackson Group and Penang Property Talk. Completion 2028 per the developer. Land title recorded as commercial, to be confirmed with the developer. Prices are the developer's, as at 12 August 2026. Foreign-buyer minimum, state levy and stamp duty per Penang state authority guidelines; short-term-rental rules per Penang's Private Homestay Guidelines (in force 1 April 2023). RPGT per Schedule 5 of the Real Property Gains Tax Act 1976 — see our RPGT calculator.