Abstract
Multiculturalism has been a cornerstone of social harmony and stability in Singapore’s diverse society. It is of a pressing need to address any source of discrimination to protect the state’s doctrine of racial and cultural equality. However, rental discrimination has been understudied in the local rental housing market despite anecdotal evidence uncovering incidences of rental discrimination experienced by members of minority groups. This study aims to bridge this gap by achieving a better understanding on the prevalence of rental prejudice as well as its economic effects on social groups. Web-scraping is used to extract data from property website, 99.co, to conduct hedonic modelling. Using the website’s ‘Diversity-Friendly’ label as the focal point of the research, the positive and significant coefficients have proved that those who are discriminated against are burdened with a rental premium after controlling independent variables such as area, furnishing, tenure and distances to several amenities. It was also found that the magnitude of rental premium varies across regions and property types. Data collected from Reddit further illustrated that there is a growing attention paid towards rental discrimination against ethnic minorities. These findings carry implications as it highlights how discriminatory practices would lead to unequal treatment of individuals in the rental housing market, which depicts a stark contrast to Singapore’s melting pot image. Stricter regulations should be considered to help eliminate the amount of bigotry on rental advertisements. Policies should also address taste-based discrimination as it is the main source of discrimination which stems from existing prejudice views held by the agent or landlord.