House owners reluctant to rent flats to bachelor tenants

Thousands of bachelors live in Dhaka for educational and professional purposes. They share flats and often 10 to 12 people live in a house. However, getting a flat with the ‘bachelor’ identity is not easy.

Landlords often prefer to rent their houses to people who live with other family members to bachelors. Single tenants in the city share stories that sometimes landowners shut the door on them when they know that they are bachelor.

“Managing a landowner to agree to rend a flat to a bachelor is like a herculean task. You have to give good effort to make them convince,” Abdullah Al Mamun, a masters student of Jagannath University, said.

He shared with Jago News that he had been looking for a house for quite a long time but failed to manage one.

“When they know that I am a single tenant, they just cut the phone connection,” he said.

He said that every single tenant in the city goes through this bitter experience.

Scores of bachelor are facing this type of problem in the capital. A visit to several areas in the capital shows that there are many to-let notices attached on the wall but with a phrase ‘Not for bachelors’.

In many cases, landlords demand more than the usual rental fees.

Kamruzzaman Tamal, who has completed his masters and looking for a job, has been living in a mess along with his two colleagues for last year.

He said that they need to rent a new house with bigger accommodation but they are not getting one with a reasonable rental price as most landlords are asking for more than the normal price only because they are bachelors.

Speaking to the single tenants, Jago News learnt that many young men are leaving the capital.

When asked why they do not want to rent their flats to bachelors, landowners said that they have to face varies problems when they rent their houses to bachelors.

“When I rent my house, other renters do not want to live in my house. Bachelors create a lot of problems in the house. Neighbors are not happy with bachelors in most the cases,” Ershad Ali, a homeowner in the Shewrapara area in the capital, told Jago News.

“There is also a recent concern of militancy,” he added.

(The article originally published in Bangla edition of Jagonews24.com is written in English by Zobaer Ahmed)