Racial discrimination seen in nearly half of Klang Valley room rental listings

2026-03-12 - 07:34

The study found that over half of listings in five Klang Valley areas have racial exclusions – Ampang (57.5%), Taman Desa (56.2%), Klang (54.8%), Setapak (51.1%) and Bangi (50.5%). (Envato Elements pic) PETALING JAYA: Nearly half of room rental listings in the Klang Valley on the room-for-rent platform iBilik state that prospective tenants of a certain race are not welcome, a new study has revealed. An analysis of 35,367 listings collected on Feb 2 and 3 by NGO Architects of Diversity (AOD) found that 42.8% explicitly exclude at least one racial group, “making discrimination the most common landlord stance on the platform”. “Landlords can openly refuse tenants on the basis of race, and tenants who are excluded have no legal avenue for redress,” AOD executive director Jason Wee said in a statement today. The study also found that over half of listings in five Klang Valley areas have racial exclusions – Ampang (57.5%), Taman Desa (56.2%), Klang (54.8%), Setapak (51.1%) and Bangi (50.5%). “Even in Sentul, the area with the lowest rate of discrimination against Indians, 8.5% of listings still exclude Indians as tenants,” the NGO said. AOD also said that by having the race preference feature that allows landlords to filter prospective tenants by race, iBilik is normalising discrimination. “When a platform lets landlords tick a box to exclude an entire race from seeing their listing, it is actively enabling discrimination at scale,” Wee said. AOD said it classified listings as discriminatory if the landlord had activated the platform’s race preference function and explicitly excluded one or more racial groups. “A price range of RM200 to RM1,500 was applied to filter out non-room rental entries,” it said. Indians face the heaviest burden AOD said Indians were the most affected, as 31.7% of listings explicitly exclude Indian tenants, compared with 7.6% for Malays and 3.9% for Chinese. The most common pattern is excluding Indian tenants while accepting Malay and Chinese tenants, accounting for 21.3% of listings studied. Listings open to Indian tenants are also 11.2% more expensive, averaging RM735 per month, compared with RM661 for those that exclude them, leaving them with a “smaller and more expensive pool of available housing”.