Platforms Cannot Rebrand Discrimination as “Compatibility”

PRESS STATEMENT 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

14 March 2026

Platforms Cannot Rebrand Discrimination as “Compatibility”

• Race-based tenant filters are racial discrimination. AOD rejects iBilik’s attempt to frame its race preference feature as a tool for “compatibility” and encourages it to look at the victims of rental exclusion.

• iBilik's policy is an outlier in the market. Other major Malaysian property and rental platforms, including PropertyGuru, iProperty, Speedhome, and Mudah.my, do not offer built-in race filters for tenant selection.

• AOD calls for the feature’s removal and regulatory action. AOD urges iBilik to remove its racial preference function and calls on the Board of Valuers, Appraisers, Estate Agents and Property Managers to take a clear stance against estate agents facilitating racial discrimination in the rental market.

Architects of Diversity (AOD) notes iBilik's statement published on 13 March 2026 in response to our report, Room Rental Discrimination. Volume 1: The Klang Valley Report. In its statement, iBilik described its built-in race preference feature as a tool to "ease the search process" and facilitate "compatibility between housemates," while denying that it supports or promotes racial discrimination in any form. We wish to address this directly.

Excluding someone by race is discrimination, regardless of how it is labelled

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. A landlord who excludes a tenant from consideration based on their race, before even knowing them, is not making an individual assessment of compatibility. That landlord is making a blanket judgment about an individual based on generalisations of their race. That is what the word "discrimination" means, and no amount of reframing it as "compatibility" or "living requirements" changes the nature of the act.

Our data makes this pattern clear. Across the 35,367 listings we analysed, 31.7% explicitly exclude Indian renters, while only 7.6% exclude Malay renters and 3.9% exclude Chinese renters. The single most common discriminatory pattern on the platform is the exclusion of Indian tenants alone, while still accepting Malay and Chinese tenants, a pattern found in over one in five of all listings. This is not a story about housemate preferences. It is racial exclusion of a minority group at scale, and the data leaves very little room for an alternative reading.

Housing is a basic need, and for landlords, renting out a room is a commercial transaction. When someone lists a room for rent on a public platform, they are entering the market as a service provider. No legitimate business transaction in this country should come with a built-in mechanism to sort prospective customers by race. 

Normalising exclusion has real consequences for real people

A culture of discrimination has real consequences. We implore iBilik to consider real cases of discrimination such as the Malaysian Indian woman who shared publicly that she was rejected by landlords and agents over 300 times because of her race, despite having a solid credit history and a clean rental track record. Or the case of Kinney Junior Clarence, a Kadazan man from Sabah, who was told a room in Bukit Puchong was "reserved for local Malaysians only" because the agent did not even recognise his ethnicity as Malaysian. These are the lived consequences of a rental culture where racial exclusion has been so deeply normalised that platforms build tools for it and then describe those tools as a convenience feature.

When a platform tells its users that filtering tenants by race is simply part of "narrowing down listings," it communicates that this behaviour is acceptable and expected. The people who bear the cost of that message are Malaysians who are denied housing not because of their conduct, income, or references, but because of the colour of their skin.

iBilik's policy is an outlier in the market

iBilik's defence implies that its race preference function is a natural feature of the rental market. It is not. Among Malaysia's major property and rental platforms, including PropertyGuru, iProperty, SpeedHome, and Mudah.my, none offer a built-in function that allows landlords to exclude prospective tenants by race. iBilik stands alone in having made the deliberate design choice to build this capability into its system.

We are not naive. Removing a filter will not eliminate discrimination from the rental market, prejudice exists with or without a checkbox. But platforms have a responsibility not to make discrimination easier, and a race filter does exactly that. It automates and scales what would otherwise be individual acts of prejudice, turning them into a frictionless, normalised part of how housing is listed and searched in this country. If iBilik is sincere in its claim that it does not support racial discrimination, the path forward is straightforward: remove the feature. Every other major platform in Malaysia operates without one, and iBilik can do the same.

Our call to being better Malaysians

AOD calls on iBilik to remove its racial preference feature immediately. A platform that claims to have served over 20 million tenants should not be in the business of helping landlords decide which of those tenants deserve consideration based on race.

AOD also calls on the Board of Valuers, Appraisers, Estate Agents and Property Managers (LPEPH) to issue a clear and public stance against registered estate agents and property managers who facilitate racial discrimination in the rental market. Our research shows that agents are active participants in this system, and the professional body that regulates them should not remain silent.

Statement by: 

Jason Wee

Executive Director

Architects of Diversity