When Sunil first moved to Singapore, he had trouble finding an apartment.
“I called up several landlords who had listed rooms for rent,” Sunil, a Sri Lankan who spent eight years living in the UK, said.
“Things would start out OK, maybe because of my [Western] accent – but the moment they heard my name, they’d blank out. Many said ‘sorry, we don’t rent to these people’, or ‘sorry, no room for Indians’.”
Sunil, a civil engineer who arrived in 2012, said he was rejected by at least four landlords.
“I told them that Sri Lanka was not India, that I wouldn’t eat or cook in the apartment, and that I would be outside all day. But still, they wouldn’t offer me a room,” he said.
“At that point, I got fed up and decided to only try Indian landlords. I was invited to viewings right away.”
‘Cleanliness and culture’
Sunil is not alone. A quick glance at online rental listings shows many that include the words: “no Indians, no PRCs [People’s Republic of China]”, sometimes followed by the word “sorry”.