Architects of Diversity (AOD) said while it recognises that landlords face risks in renting to strangers, race is not a measure of whether someone will pay rent on time or care for a unit.
“What landlords need are proper legal protections in a Residential Tenancy Act that gives them clear remedies for non-payment, property damage, and lease violations.
“When the law gives landlords real tools to protect their interests, the impulse to fall back on racial stereotypes loses its justification.
“The answer is not a race filter on a website, but a regulatory framework that protects both landlords and tenants fairly,” it said.
AOD had previously criticised room-for-rent listings agency iBilik for its race preference feature that allows landlords to filter tenants by race, which it said normalises discrimination and “actively enables discrimination at scale”.
It released a new report today on room rental discrimination, extending its earlier analysis of explicit racial exclusion on iBilik from the Klang Valley to states across West Malaysia.
Building on the same dataset used for the previous report, collected from Feb 2-3, it said a study of 40,294 room rental listings on iBilik across Peninsular Malaysia found that 43.6% explicitly exclude at least one racial group.
AOD said the previous study found Indian renters bear the “overwhelming burden of exclusion” in the Klang Valley, with 31.7% of listings excluding them, compared to 7.6% for Malays.
However, Malay renters in Kedah, Perak and Penang face higher exclusion rates.
“In Penang, the largest iBilik rental market outside the Klang Valley (2,367 listings), 18.3% of listings exclude Malay renters.
“In island areas such as George Town (29.8%) and Tanjung Tokong (29.0%), nearly one in three listings is closed to Malay tenants. ‘Chinese-only’ listings account for 16.9% of the Penang market,” it said.
In Perak, it said, 25.6% of 199 listings exclude Malay renters, while 30.2% of 149 listings do the same in Kedah.
“While sample sizes for Kedah and Perak are small and their figures should be treated with caution, the pattern is corroborated by the larger Penang market,” it said.
AOD repeated its call for iBilik to remove its racial preference feature, and reiterated its rejection of the platform’s justification that the tool facilitates “compatibility between housemates”.
“When a platform allows a landlord to tick a box that excludes an entire racial group from being considered as tenants, the outcome is exclusion on the basis of race, regardless of how it is labelled.
“The practice documented in this report would be illegal under housing anti-discrimination laws in the US, UK, EU, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, among others,” it said.