Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

Long story short – it’s hard but still a necessary thing, so you’ll have to manage it. To work here, you have to have a place to stay in.

My rented place in Holland Village was nice, but I felt it was time to get a new scenery – any scenery – and it was timely that our three-year contract was up and due in two weeks. But it was due in an inconvenient day – November 21 – so I had to swallow a chunk of cost. Fortunately, I found a nice rental place in Geylang last month, and it took me a while to move in to the new unit. But it was very exhausting to get to that point. And I’d love to expand and discuss the process.

Let’s start with finding a rental room. Hoo boy, that was the hardest part.

Moving is painful and costly but looking is way more mentally exhausting and anxiety-inducing. Truth be told, this is the first time in my working life in Singapore that I had to look for a room on my own. For the past years, I relied on a co-worker (who also was Filipino) to help me find a room, and both times he was the main tenant, I was more than OK with being a +1. In 2018, one of his former co-tenants did the jouhatsu thing and bolted out of Singapore like a bat out of a cave, so I nicely moved in to the sudden vacancy. During the pandemic years, I also relied on him to find us a new rental HDB unit, which he found one – and it was just two blocks away down the road. Now, he got married this year and he moved in with his wife in a condo unit somewhere near our office area, and I had to jaunt out of my own to find a place to stay.

PERSONAL CRITERIA

I had some only-me, personal criteria on the ideal place I wanted to move in to:

1. The rental cost must be on or below SGD 1800. It’s not an arbitrary number – my share in the previous rental unit (including utilities and WiFi) was SGD 1500, and I had added 20% as an “inflation” buffer. It’s the cost of which I can still swallow. Anything below that is better for me. Anything above that is a no-go no matter how shiny or perfect the setup is. So basically, this is a non-negotiable just for me.
   
2. It should be near my employer’s office (which is within the Paya Lebar planning area on the East Region of Singapore). My previous one was in Holland Village – while the place is quiet and nice, is still quite far away from either my workplace or the airport. Conveniently it had a Circle Line station to which I used to go to work or somewhere on a train station, but it’s a good 40-50 minutes of daily transportation time (plus walking). This time, I’d rather return to a convenience I had in 2018. This is also a non-negotiable.
   
   Oh yeah, why Holland Village before? One of my previous employers in 2018 had an office at the One Commonwealth commercial building, which was a 5-minute walk from the first HDB unit I rented in 2018. That was a super-amazing convenience to me at the time. I’d love to get some of that feel back.
   
3. No owners/landlords living in the same flat as me. This one is also a non-negotiable, maybe the hardest no-no of the three so far. I’d rather not play a personality/vibe guessing game here. Note, this is just a personal preference and not an indictment of the “live-in landlord” experience as a whole.
   
4. It should be within a short distance from either an MRT station (with a direct line to Paya Lebar) or a bus stop (with a direct bus to my employer’s office address). Singapore’s transportation system is well-designed, but as with all countries that developed similar amazing transportation systems, their effectiveness varies depending on where you live. One of my previous co-tenants went to live near Bedok when she rented a new place to stay with her husband who came to Singapore for work. Visiting her a few years ago made me realize how living convenience goes hand in hand with transportation convenience, because her new condominium rental was a solid 10-15 minute walk from the Kembangan MRT station, and the nearest bus stop was a good 4-5 minute walk away from the condo gates. No wonder her rent was cheap there – it was an inconvenient location for most office workers. For me I’d rather pay for the convenience of having transportation options close at home. But unlike #1 and #2, I put a longer leash on this one. I can live for a couple years with this minor inconvenience if #1 and #2 is as attractive as possible.
   
5. [OPTIONAL] I’d love it if I could find a place with all-Filipino co-tenants. I have nothing against other races – one of my previous co-tenants in Holland Village was from Myanmar, we got along super well. But I also knew in the back of my mind that I got lucky. I’ve heard stories of other races clashing in the same rental place. I read somewhere on a forum that one of my countrymen rented a place with existing co-tenants in Ang Mo Kio, and the main tenant nicknamed him “Mr Bodoh”, he did not know what that meant until one Malay co-worker told him what that meant. I’d rather avoid a similar fate if I could, I can only speak/understand three languages. But, if the non-negotiable factors were too tantalizing to pass on, I’ll gladly take risk and rent with this optional caveat tearfully stricken out (lol).
   
6. [OPTIONAL] I’d prefer a solo unit with its own bathroom/toilet and minimal interaction with other tenants. Socializing is nice but for all intents I prefer, I’m still an introvert. I’d prefer if the rental place has something that allows for such a way that I could have something private all to myself – like a bathroom.
   
   One of the little wrinkles of renting a whole unit with 2 or more people as co-tenants is that you share one bathroom/toilet. If someone’s using it, you can’t use it. So many times in the past I had to hold back a shitstorm in cold sweats because someone is taking their sweet time doing the #2, or I woke up late for work and I had to do a quick shower only to find someone is also taking a shower. Yeah, the second one’s on me, but still. This time, I’d like it if some way is available so that I get a whole bathroom/toilet to myself at all times.
   
   Minimal interaction is a bonus. I’d love to have it if possible, but I don’t mind waving it off.

I do have some qualifiers when it comes to environment, but I waved it off from my filtering. I lived in Mandaluyong, I lived in Manggahan. I have no problem with grittier places, no problem with hustle and bustle at all. Also, I kind of want a surprise. I was looking for any drastic change of scenery but one that isn’t egregiously off-putting.

Holland Village is nice and quiet, but I have grave personal qualms with continuing to live in there any further. For one, it’s chock-full of very old people, some living alone or with helpers. Every day when I go down the elevator and walk to the MRT, along the way of the HDB I can reliably count at least ten elderly people. Along the sidewalk, more old people. Yearly there’s always two or three funerals in the HDB void deck, and at night I occasionally hear people – likely the elderly too – shouting and screaming a few blocks away. I don’t know what they’re speaking or shouting about, it’s a blessing I don’t speak their language and frankly I’d rather not peek into what they’re onto. And sometimes, maybe on an unlucky occasion, I’d hear the familiar wails of an ambulance nearby that stops for a bit then resumes after a while. For many years there, I felt like I was living in a “home for the aged” kind of thing. It’s a vibe that I never really got along with despite the length of time I’ve stayed there – I’ve stayed in Holland Village for more than 5 years already – so I’m more than ready to try other places and try out other vibes.

Not to mention the rising rent prices there. Holland Village is well-known for having a strong expat presence, and based from the shops replacing the older mainstays and the new swanky open-air mall that attracts lots of patrons, that ain’t changing. The rent prices are getting out of hand. I think my previous HDB unit’s landlord was angling to get more monies after he narrowly missed out of the pandemic-era rent prices. Me and my co-worker got the unit for a monthly rental fee that turned out to be a steal after a few months – it turned out to be at least SGD 500 less than the sudden uptick in market price. When one of my co-worker’s friends asked to rent the smaller extra room, the landlord tried to make us pay for way more but thankfully the agent negotiated a lower one. After that, no way I am OK with staying. If we renewed, the landlord might’ve asked for condo-level prices.

With those in mind, I started back in August to look for a new place to stay at.

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