There are numerous housing estate and new town developments in the metropolitan.  These developments are mostly located around Johor Bahru City, Pasir Gudang and Kulai.  Generally, the housing developments in the metropolitan can be classified into the following regions: Tebrau growth corridor, Nusajaya, Pasir Gudang Highway growth corridor and Kulai/Senai highway growth corridor.

Currently, housing developments are very fast spreading outward with Johor Bahru City being the nucleus.  In fact, new large-scale housing estate developments are no longer appearing in the city proper.  Big housing estates such as Taman Johor Jaya (Johor Jaya Housing Estate) and Taman Puteri Kulai (Puteri Kulai Housing Estate) has grown into kind-of regional centres of the metropolitan.

Large-scale new town developments such as Bandar Baru Seri Alam (Seri Alam New Town) and Bandar Baru Nusajaya (Nusajaya New Town) are fast constructing at the border of the city proper.  These new town developments would usually involve land area of no less than 3,000 acres.  These developments provide good quality and affordable housing with advanced telecommunication facilities such as optical fibre, civic and public centres, industrial area, recreational area, commercial centre and so on.

The state government has launched a programme in hope that all the people in the state will have their own house to stay in.  The newest scheme in this project is the aim to complete and provide 12,000 such houses in Johor Bahru district by the year 2000.  It is projected that by then, all the shanty settlements in Johor Bahru district would have been cleared, thus making Johor Bahru the first city in Malaysia without any shanty settlements.

On the condominium and apartment sub-sector, developments have been slowing down due to an oversupply of units to the market.   These medium and high density residential developments are commonly seen near the vicinity of the City Centre and also in those large-scale new town developments.

Concealed drains and underground-wiring are slowly becoming a de facto standard in the new developments.  Green Street concept is also being adopted by the developers and some developers have actually gone further into natural and urban habitat balanced developments such as recycling of waste water within the housing estate.