The three month minimum, in practice
Every room we let carries a three month minimum stay. Here is where that comes from, what it means for how the agreement is written, and what we actually do when someone has to leave in month two.
All nineteen of our rooms carry the same minimum stay: three months. It is on every listing, it is in every agreement, and it is the first thing we say when someone asks about a six week stay.
It is not a house rule we invented to make our lives easier. Private residential property in Singapore has a minimum stay of three consecutive months, and that floor applies to the whole unit and to every room in it. There is no version of a two month let in a condominium that is quietly fine because everyone is nice about it.
What it changes about the agreement
The rule is easy to state and easy to get wrong in the paperwork, because the temptation is to write a flexible agreement and then rely on goodwill.
We do the opposite. The minimum is written as a term, not as a preference. The agreement runs for a fixed period of at least three months. Notice cannot expire before the end of that period. If a tenant wants the flexibility to leave early, that is a conversation about what happens to the deposit and about finding a replacement, and it is a conversation held against a term that already exists rather than against a vague understanding.
The difference sounds like lawyering. It is not. It is the difference between a disagreement in month two being a negotiation and being an argument about what was said at a viewing eleven weeks earlier.
What we do when someone has to leave early
People's lives change. Someone loses a job, someone's posting moves, someone's relationship ends. It happens several times a year and pretending otherwise is not a policy.
What we do is straightforward and we say it up front. The term stands. We market the room immediately, at the same price, and the moment a replacement signs and moves in, the leaving tenant stops being responsible. If we let it in two weeks they pay for two weeks. If it takes six, they pay for six. We do not charge anyone for a void twice, and we do not pretend the room is impossible to fill when it is not.
The deposit is one month, and it is a deposit, not a fee. It is for damage and unpaid amounts. It is not a fine for leaving.
The thing people get wrong
The mistake is not usually greed. It is optimism. An owner or an operator takes a good tenant for ten weeks because the alternative is an empty room, tells themselves it is a rounding error, and writes the agreement loosely so nobody has to look at it too closely.
That loose agreement is the problem long after the tenant is gone. It is the one that cannot be stamped cleanly, that reads badly if anyone ever does look, and that leaves you with no term to point at the next time somebody wants to leave in week six.
Three months is not a long time. Write it down properly and the whole category of argument disappears.
