Darius Cheung, founder of Singapore-based property listing site 99.co, is married to Indian-Singaporean wife Roshni Mahtani, who’s also an entrepreneur (she started parenting portaltheAsianparent).
Late last year, they began searching for a property to rent, thinking that an oversupply of apartments would make it easy. They were wrong.
You see, as a Chinese Singaporean man, Darius had been sheltered from the everyday racism felt by minorities. He was about to get an education.
“I began to notice something very odd as we went for these viewings, something I never encountered before in the dozen years that I’ve been renting,” he writes on the company blog.
“On several occasions, the agents seemed eager to end the viewings quickly, sometimes without even discussing the offer. I would text them afterwards to negotiate on the price, but one of the responses we got was a shocking ‘Sorry your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you. Next time please indicate earlier, so we both don’t waste time.’”
He did precisely that. True enough, 20 percent of their enquiries were rejected right away because Roshni was mentioned in the text message.
“In one case, after the typical vague response of ‘profile doesn’t match,’ I pushed harder to ask ‘Is it because my wife is Indian?’, and the response was a dead-pan ‘yes, thanks for your understanding.’”
They ended up paying 15 percent more than what they should have because of their difficulty finding a place.
The event led to some soul-searching. They wanted to include both parents’ surnames in their daughter’s name. They thought about dropping the Indian surname to protect her, but decided against it.
So Darius sought to do something about racial discrimination in the property market. He writes:
If you google ‘No Indian No PRC’, you will find actual rental listings in Singapore in the top results. The problem is so prevalent that even BBC had extensive coverage on it some time ago.
Enquiries about rental properties often come with a series of profiling questions that includes ‘What race are you?’, ‘Where are you from?’, or outright rejection by stating ‘Profile doesn’t match.’ The top two groups of people who receive discriminatory responses are Indians and PRCs (referring to those from the People’s Republic of China).
Landlords often cite reasons like “lack of cleanliness”, “likelihood of damaging the apartment,” and even “I don’t like them.”
99.co is now tackling this by introducing an “all-races-welcome” indicator on its website. What this means is that agents and landlords can positively indicate that their properties can be rented by anyone regardless of ethnicity. Such listings will get prominent placing on the website.
“The idea is to give renters peace of mind during their home search journey – reducing instances of rude comments and unpleasant experiences while enquiring about listings.”
Source: www.techinasia.com
