Our Landlord Moved Back In, So We Had Three Months to Find a New Home
Our landlord told us he was moving back into the flat. That was it, that was the whole reason we had to leave Bishan.
Nothing had gone wrong. We loved that place. Bishan Park was right there, enormous, and both girls were at a childcare centre five minutes on foot. Everything about our week was built around a two hundred metre radius, and then one conversation ended it.
He gave us notice well ahead, which I appreciated at the time and appreciate even more now knowing how these things can go. So we had three months. Three months sounded generous until we actually started looking.
The Non-Negotiable Was Childcare, Not the Flat
My wife and I were both working, and even with a helper, the thing that genuinely could not break was childcare continuity. The girls needed to walk out of one centre on a Friday and into another the following week. No gap. That single constraint shaped everything else.
The other constraint was commute. My office is basically central. My wife's sits between central and the east. So we drew a mental line at Simei on the east side and told ourselves that was the limit.
Central was too expensive. West felt psychologically too far even though the map doesn't really support that feeling. So east it was.
Three Months of Refreshing PropertyGuru
I checked PropertyGuru multiple times a day for weeks. Not once a day. Multiple times, in gaps between meetings, on the MRT, at night after the kids were down.
For every listing that looked plausible I'd also check what childcare centres were nearby and whether they had immediate places, and what parks were within reach. Then I'd message the agent and book a viewing. Weeknights after work, one or two. Weekends, we'd leave the girls with our helper and knock out three in an afternoon.
Then I hit the thing nobody warned me about. Landlords want tenants who can move in soon. When you tell them you're available in three months, most of them simply stop replying. That first month was almost entirely wasted on rejections, and I ended up treating it as reconnaissance instead, learning neighbourhoods, working out what was near what. Real viewing only started at the two month mark.
The Second Time, We Skipped the Agent
For our move into Bishan, we'd used an agent, a Korean agent, and honestly it was worth it then. I asked an enormous number of questions and learned how the whole process actually works.
Moving to Pasir Ris, I looked at what an agent actually does for a tenant and thought, I can do this. I can document defects thoroughly. I can read a tenancy agreement properly, and now I can run it past AI to check for clauses that don't belong there.
So we went without one. The fee structure is straightforward, two-year lease means one month's rent to your agent, one-year lease means half a month. Skipping that is real money.
What replaced the agent was time. I spent about three hours photographing every defect in the unit before we moved in. Then across the first month of living there I kept a running list of everything needing repair, sent the whole thing to the landlord's agent, and we negotiated item by item. This gets fixed, this one we'll live with. Then a handyman came for a day and worked through the list.
I'd already done a version of this in Bishan alongside our agent, and even then I was the one being more thorough. Turns out that's just my personality, and it happens to be exactly the personality this task rewards.
Bigger and Older, Versus Smaller and Newer
Our Bishan flat was an HDB about thirty years old. Slightly tired from the outside, decent inside, and genuinely large, somewhere around 1,260 square feet. Rent at the end was 3,400.
Pasir Ris is a condo-style HDB, much newer, clean, well finished inside. It's also noticeably smaller, roughly 960 square feet. And it costs more, 3,800.
Less space, higher rent, further out. Written like that it sounds like a bad trade.
It wasn't, and the reason is everything sitting outside the front door.
[사진2 들어갈자리: alt/title 텍스트 "view from HDB balcony overlooking low-rise blocks and pond"]
Everything Within Walking Distance
The MRT is three minutes on foot. Both our commutes turned out to be a single ride on the East-West Line, no changes, and the total time was better than what we'd had in Bishan. Simei had been our psychological limit and Pasir Ris is two stops past it, which works out to about seven extra minutes. Seven.
There are three large malls nearby. Groceries, kids' activities, tuition centres, all of it. And Pasir Ris Park with that huge adventure playground, plus the beach a short bike ride away.
I've been here two years now and I have not been to Orchard once. Not once. There's simply never been a reason.
Why This Unit Specifically
Corridor-facing HDB units mean people walk past your door constantly. This one is an end unit, so unless someone is specifically coming to see us, nobody passes. Open the front door and there's no one there.
The balcony looks out over low-rise blocks, five storeys, and past them a fishing pond. Open view, which you don't get often at this price.
We viewed another unit in the same development and it was in poor shape, cracked glass, tired interior. Made the decision easy.
They initially quoted 3,850 because our move-in date was later than they wanted. I pushed back, pointed at the listing price, and we settled at 3,800. Small win, but it was the listed number and I wasn't paying above it.
The Clause I Read and Somehow Didn't Register
Here's my actual mistake. We viewed that flat multiple times, daytime and evening, checked the natural light properly. I ran the tenancy agreement through AI, compared it against our previous contract line by line, looked for anything unusual.
And I still missed the one that mattered. The landlord may sell after twelve months, and the tenant gets two months' notice.
Our lease ran June 2024 to June 2026. In January 2026 he told us he was putting it on the market.
Two months' notice sounds survivable until you sit with it. If you wait passively and it sells, you have sixty days to find somewhere and move. If you start looking now and find something good, you're told the flat hasn't sold so you still owe rent here. Whichever way you play it, you're the one holding the bag. I sat with that for a couple of days genuinely annoyed, not at anything illegal, just at how neatly the whole thing was stacked against us.
Plus viewings. Strangers walking through your home on someone else's schedule.
My first instinct was pettiness. Saturday, these hours only, take it or leave it. We had a helper home anyway so access wasn't actually a problem for us, I just wanted it to be a problem for him.
Then I thought about it properly. The faster it sells, the faster we're free to move somewhere we actually want. So I told them to come whenever, any day, helper's home.
That turned out to be the right call. A good unit came up in the same development, meaning no childcare change for the girls, and the new landlord was flexible enough to hold it until we could move. I suspect we were an easier tenant than most, and it came back to us at exactly the moment it mattered.
We moved again. Same development, same childcare, same three-minute walk to the MRT. Second time in two years I've packed this family up, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't slightly dreading whatever the next lease has buried in it.
Related reading:
What Nobody Tells You About the Condo Handover and Getting Your Deposit Back
We'd Lived Here Six Years and Never Seen the Merlion Until My In-Laws Visited
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