If you’ve just finished school, chances are that you’re considering tertiary education. Starting a new college or university life isn’t as easy as one might think. After all, many are leaving home for the first time to further their studies. What are the challenges ahead? Just to name a few, the anxiety of leaving one’s comfort zone, the doubtful thoughts of having to choose the next big step, where to study and where to stay? Here, we are trying to address one of the questions, searching for student accommodation in Asia.
Whether you’re a new student or a senior one, you’ll have to live on or near campus. This is true for a majority of students, except for those that choose to study nearby and continue living with their parents.
If you’re leaving the nest, it’s important that you consider where to live and who you’re staying with. The easiest way to do this is to start room-hunting online.
Wherever you choose to study in Southeast Asia, there are plenty of websites ready to help you, either short term, mid-term or of the long term room rental. Here are some recommended websites.
1. Roomz.Asia : Malaysia and Singapore
Roomz is a site dedicated to help to find your perfect room to rent. The site has more than 15,000 rooms listed all over Malaysia and Singapore. Whether you are looking for a room in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Johor or any other states, options are available for anyone, students, expatriates, digital nomads and etc. Did we say free? If you have not heard of them before, yes, it is free.
Basically, for students, all you have to do is key in the name of your college, university or the location in the search bar and you’ll be directed to a list of all available rooms nearby.
The site has easy to handle filters, which allow you to narrow down your choices based on the price range, availability of certain facilities, room size and short term acceptance.
The facilities feature is really helpful, as you’ll be able to pick rooms based on whether there’s parking, an attached bathroom, near a transit station and more. In case you would like to have the entire unit to your own, simply select the renting whole unit in the filter.
ROOMZ
2. REA Group Limited : Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Thailand
REA Group operates numerous websites across Asia. They offer a wide range of services, from searching to purchase of property, looking for new property launching and renting a room or whole unit. Some features are not offered across countries that they operate in, such as home services, design, mover services and auction property. Their range of services are too wide to be covered under this article. We recommend visiting the individual country website to discover more. Their filters include searching under the type of property, price range, property size and number of bedroom. Here is a list of property websites under REA Group in a different country across Asia.
| Australia | https://www.realestate.com.au |
| https://flatmates.com.au | |
| Hong Kong | https://www.squarefoot.com.hk |
| India | https://housing.com |
| Indonesia | https://www.rumah123.com |
| Malaysia | https://www.iproperty.com.my |
| Singapore | https://www.iproperty.com.sg |
| Thailand | https://thinkofliving.com |
3. Ibilik : Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Brunei
As the name suggested, Ibilik is a room rental specialist. Their main focus is to provide a website for room seeker. They have a clean and straight forward way to conduct a search for rooms. A quick and simple search option, for those who prefer an easy to understand way to conduct searches. They claim to have the largest rental databases in each country. Although they may not have a wide variety of features like Iproperty, their focus is to get the job done, search for a room, instead of having moving services, auction property and etc that would distract the main purpose.
4. University Living: Singapore, International
University Living is a site that caters to students from around the world. They feature rooms in some of the most prestigious University towns in the world, including Cambridge and Exeter in the UK, New York and Los Angeles in the USA as well as Melbourne and Sydney in Australia.
One Asian city that is featured on this site is Singapore. The search bar is optimized to display rooms according to the University or College name, so you can search according to the name of your institution rather than the neighborhood.
The unique thing about this site is that they have a rating system for all the student lodgings featured. This way, you’ll know the quality of the place based on the amount of stars given.
UniversityLiving
5. Nestpick: International
Accommodation aggregator site Nestpick caters to many major cities around the globe. Asian cities such as Manila of Philippines, Jakarta of Indonesia and Bangkok of Thailand are all listed. There’s a section specially dedicated to just rooms, which allows you to filter once you have selected the city of choice.
There are also whole apartments, student residences and studios for rent. You can choose the type of residence you want at the top bar via the drop down menu.
The facilities offered by each room are shown as simple icons at the bottom of each room’s picture, so it’s easier to pick. The prices are also displayed prominently.
The map layout of all the available rooms means that you can see the locations of all rooms in a single glance. This is another reason why Nestpick is extremely useful.
Nestpick
6. Thaiger Property, HipFlat: Thailand
Thaiger and Hipflat both have similar features. Both are property platform that caters to buy, sell and rent. Just select the preferred option and input the location of choice. You may select the number of rooms and your budget for a more specific search. HipFlat has an option to filter properties that are close to a transit station.
7. KostJakarta, SewaKost , Sewa-apartemen, Olx : Indonesia
In Indonesia, room rental are referred to ‘kos or kost’, also known as a guest house. Most website listed here are in local languages, however, their search features are rather straightforward. Just input the location of preference, such as the location of your university, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, etc, and you are good to go. Just conduct a simple google translate if the description is too complicated, but most are simple to understand.
Online room hunting saves you time and resources. It gives you a clearer picture of what is available before you actually visit the site and make a firm decision. With your lodgings secured, you can now enjoy your student life to its fullest.
