Rental discrimination remains common in Singapore because the rental market still makes it easy, quiet, and rewarding for the people who hold the decision power. Even in a society that invests heavily in social cohesion and public messaging about harmony, renting is often treated as a private, discretionary choice. It happens behind closed doors, in group chats, and through quick conversations with property agents. When a decision is private, fast, and difficult to scrutinize, unfair patterns can persist even when most people agree, in principle, that they should not.
At its core, discrimination in renting survives because it functions like a shortcut. A landlord faced with multiple applicants will sometimes reduce a complicated decision into a simple filter. Instead of evaluating tenant suitability through clear, consistent criteria, the landlord leans on assumptions about groups of people. This is not only about race. It can involve nationality, family status, language, occupation, or lifestyle stereotypes. The common thread is the same: using identity as a stand-in for risk. When the market offers landlords enough choice, the temptation to use shortcuts rises, and the cost of doing so feels low.
That dynamic becomes stronger when the rental market is tight. In periods of high demand, landlords can be selective without sacrificing price or occupancy. They do not have to trade off preferences against profit. If one applicant is rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to pay, another applicant can quickly take their place. Scarcity changes the moral temperature of transactions. It does not make discrimination acceptable, but it makes it easier to rationalize. In an abundant market, bias can be expensive. In a tight market, bias can be convenient.
The structure of rental transactions also makes discrimination hard to detect and harder to challenge. Unlike a public advertisement, which can be seen and reported, the actual decision often happens in private. A landlord may never state an explicit reason for rejecting a tenant. The process can look like silence, delay, or vague excuses. A unit becomes “taken” the moment a tenant with a preferred profile appears. Conversations end without clarity. From the tenant’s point of view, it feels personal and arbitrary. From the system’s point of view, it is a decision with minimal documentation and minimal accountability.
Property agents sit in the middle of this system, and their incentives can unintentionally reinforce the problem. Agents are paid to close deals. They are measured by speed, volume, and successful matches. When a landlord expresses a preference, an agent can challenge it, but challenging it may slow down the transaction and risk losing the listing to another agent who will simply comply. Over time, the industry can treat discriminatory preferences as operational constraints rather than ethical red lines. This is how a practice becomes normalized without anyone loudly defending it. It just becomes “how things are done.”
Another reason discrimination persists is the way people label it. Many landlords do not describe their decisions as exclusion. They describe them as preference, comfort, or compatibility. The language matters because it changes how the person making the choice feels about their own behavior. “I prefer someone like me” sounds softer than “I refuse to rent to you.” When renting involves sharing a home, or when a landlord feels emotionally attached to a property, the decision becomes even more personal, and preference language becomes a convenient shield. The landlord tells themselves they are protecting their peace, their family, or their lifestyle, rather than recognizing that they are denying someone access based on identity.
This connects to a deeper business reality: landlords are often not institutions. Many are individuals with one spare room or one investment unit. They do not have compliance departments or standard operating procedures. Their frame is risk management, and much of that risk management is emotional. They worry about disputes, property damage, payment delays, and the stress of dealing with conflict. Some of these risks are real, but the way they are managed often relies on stereotypes rather than evidence. When landlords do not trust that disputes can be resolved quickly and fairly, they become more defensive in screening. And when defensive screening lacks good tools, it defaults to crude heuristics.
A key driver here is the absence of widely trusted, standardized signals that can replace identity-based filtering with behavior-based assessment. In many parts of modern commerce, platforms reduced uncertainty by building credibility systems. Ratings, verification, and standardized dispute processes allow strangers to transact with less fear. In housing, credibility signals exist, but they are scattered and informal. Payslips, employer letters, personal references, and deposits all help, but they are inconsistent and sometimes intrusive. There is no universal tenant profile that landlords trust as a neutral measure of reliability. So landlords lean on what feels easiest, and what feels easiest is often what they already believe.
The problem is also reinforced by the imbalance of power in the landlord-tenant relationship. Tenants compete for homes, and many do so reminded that they can be rejected without explanation. That pressure can lead tenants to accept unequal treatment as part of the process. They may avoid pushing back, avoid asking for reasons, and avoid reporting experiences, because they simply need a place to live. When a system relies on the disadvantaged party to shoulder the cost of challenging unfairness, the system tends to stay the same.
This is why addressing rental discrimination is not just about improving attitudes. It is also about changing incentives and reducing the benefits of biased shortcuts. If discriminatory decision-making stays fast and low-risk for landlords and agents, it will remain common. If fair decision-making is slow, uncertain, and burdensome, it will remain rare. Markets typically move in the direction of lower friction, unless friction is deliberately introduced for harmful behavior or removed for beneficial behavior.
In practice, discrimination often shifts location rather than disappearing. When explicit exclusion becomes socially unacceptable, it can move from public listings into private screening. A landlord may no longer write a discriminatory line in an advertisement, but they may still instruct an agent to filter applicants quietly. Or the agent may do it preemptively, believing it will save time and prevent conflict. The surface looks cleaner, but the pipeline still produces unequal outcomes. The uncomfortable truth is that rental discrimination persists because it is a system problem disguised as an individual flaw. Yes, individual prejudice matters. But the market environment determines whether that prejudice translates into action, and whether that action is rewarded. When supply is tight, accountability is limited, and screening tools are weak, bias becomes a practical shortcut. It is not defended openly, but it is reproduced quietly.
If Singapore wants rental discrimination to decline meaningfully, it will take more than awareness campaigns and content rules. It will require a rental ecosystem that makes legitimate screening easier and discriminatory screening harder. That means clearer norms for agents, better documentation and dispute pathways that reduce landlords’ fear, and transaction designs that reduce the role of identity-based assumptions in early-stage selection. When the cost of discrimination rises, and the cost of fair matching falls, the market will change. Until then, discrimination will remain common not because people are unaware it is wrong, but because the system still allows it to be efficient.
WhatsApp
Instagram
Threads
