Racism in the Malaysian rental market. I left Alor Setar for KL after SPM and ever since then I’ve had to deal with racism when it came to room hunting. So I scraped data from a property website to quantify my experience as an Indian person looking for a place to stay.

Indians are rejected upfront for around 45% of all listings in KL & Selangor. The “no preference” listings don’t always mean Indians are welcome as the racial preference stated elsewhere or, from personal experience, agents will inform you of the preference after calling them.

This trend is consistent across all room types. However, locations that are closer to KL city centre seem to have fewer listings open to Indians. Note: filtered locations to the top 15 locations with at least 200 listings to simplify things.

On average, Indians have to pay 19% (RM107) more in monthly rent than non-Indians. To rent a master and middle room, Indians need to pay 22% and 17% more in rent than non-Indians. Rent disparity for single rooms isn’t as high, but is still 5% more expensive for Indians.

Rent disparity also varies by location. Indians would have to pay at least 21% more rent than non-Indians in locations like Wangsa Maju, SS2 and Setapak. Again, locations are filtered to top 15.

This is obviously a very basic analysis of the market and further research can and should be done into this phenomenon. However, it puts my experiences in hard numbers. I used to reach out to 10-15 agents at a time because I know most will turn me down on the basis of race.

I also used to hear of non-Indian friends/colleagues renting bigger rooms in better locations for less than what I pay. It’s fucked up but it happens. A new Residential Tenancy Act that addresses racism is scheduled to be tabled next year.

However, this act is only targeted for rental of low cost houses, which is great and all but people living in more upscale areas will still face the same issue. Also, with the current political instability idk if it will even be tabled.

So the best we can do is start changing the mindset of judging potential tenants based on irrelevant factors like race and religion and start looking at their personality, income, education, proof of employment, etc. Sekian.

DM me for data & code.