Is AirBnB or short term rental allowed in Singapore?

Singapore is a country which derives a huge portion of its income from tourism. Hence, it is no wonder that all kinds of accommodation are offered in this tiny island in the Southeast Asia region. Having residing for long term, Noona has received a lot of questions on where to stay in Singapore whenever her friends/ family members want to go holiday here. The thing is, price has always come up in the discussion.

Other than being famous for tourism, Singapore is also famous for its well-known high living cost in the world. Yep, Noona is staying in one of the most expensive cities in the world oh my gawd.

Frugal travellers for sure have considered the cheaper option of staying in Airbnb (if you have not heard on this Airbnb trend, you can check it out here). In a gist, homeowner can advertise and rent out its room in Airbnb to guests for a fee which either charged per day or per week. 

Some rooms advertised in Airbnb are really good-looking and some owners even give out amenities to use like towels, toothbrushes, shampoo, soaps and hairdryer. Noona used Airbnb during her stay in Sydney before and yeah this kind of arrangement works and it was pretty affordable too. After all, not everyone is willing to churn out a huge amount of $$ even though the view from the hotel room up there is quite nice, right?

While the thoughts of renting a room via the listing offered at Airbnb in Singapore are tempting, the regulation and law involve properties rental in Singapore is very strict. After further research before letting Noona's cousin know whether he can rent accommodation from Airbnb, Noona has found out that a new law about this has been passed in early 2017. And the law said that short term home rental is in fact ILLEGAL. Omo omo!

Some points extracted from the news by Straits Times:-

• It is illegal for homeowners to rent out its entire apartments for less than 6 months.
• Number of unrelated tenants living in the same apartments is limited to 6 

Oh well, while the door seems to be shut (at least, for now) for visitors to use the seemingly wonderful option from Airbnb. The Singapore Government has promised that there are proposals in consideration to allow such arrangement for short term staying in Singapore. But Noona suspects it will come with its own set of rules and regulations. So yeah, fingers crossed.

If you still want to rent from Airbnb at your own risk, you must be prepared if there is suddenly an inspection by the government officials. You may have to be prepared to be thrown out from the accommodation that you rent and forced to find out accommodation immediately. Noona thinks this would be very disruptive to your otherwise fun day so please be safe than sorry.