I consider myself pretty lucky with the accommodation I have managed to obtain in Singapore, even though it is really expensive. Before I write about the apartment that I am living in and show some pictures, however, I want to share how I actually got it.
On the web site for MBA admits there is a large message board on which students also posted about free rooms in shared apartments. So already in October I started contacting pretty much everyone that offered a room, but mostly they were already gone even when I sometimes got in touch with the people very shortly after they had posted on the board. Thus, I did not have a room yet when I quit work and started travelling in the beginning of December. Only a few days later, however, when I was still in Thailand, one girl that was looking for someone to take over her room in an HDB flat contacted me to ask if I was willing to take over the room (HDB stands for Housing Development Board, meaning those are government subsidized buildings in which the main tenants can only be Singapore citizens). The offer sounded interesting and was also cheap compared to the privately owned condominiums which are in the proximity of INSEAD. So I told her that I would happily take the room, and she suggested me to the landlord. Since he was apparently away from Singapore at that time and I desperately wanted to get a room so that I could focus on travelling and not have to think about my housing in Singapore all the time, I even gave him a call and he said that he would be willing to take me and he would email me the details later. Needless to say, I was happy and excited about that. Only a day later, however, I received an email from him saying that he would not rent the room to me since he had found someone who was willing to pay more (in turn also making the room much less attractive due to the 25% higher rent). Luckily, however, only a few hours before that email I had received another email from a person that I had contacted a while before that in response to a board entry and whose primary applicant was no longer willing to take the room. I also had — with some amount of foresight — not immediately rejected this offer, so I could tell him that I was willing to move in. The formalities, including the international transfer of the deposit and the first rent, I then had to organize from Myanmar — which was not at all easy, given that Internet connectivity in Myanmar is rather shaky and mobile phone roaming is not possible.
The place that I ended up in is a condominium called Heritage View. By history, it is the place that the highest proportion of INSEAD students stays at. It is actually a quite luxurious place in comparison to the HDB apartments: It consists of three towers with ~20 storeys each and multiple apartments on each floor. In the middle between the towers there are multiple swimming pools (which are really good in the hot and humid weather!), and the condominium also provides a gym, tennis courts, and other amenities. What is best about living at Heritage View, however, is the boarding school feeling that it provides. Since there are so many of us INSEAD students staying here, you can easily meet someone from your class here or leave for or return from school or social events together. Returning from the first “unofficial” welcome party last week, I shared a cab with six other people, and everyone said goodnight and went up to their apartments — a great start to a year of MBA studies in which I will surely build a close relationship to many of the other students.
A few pictures follow. (more…)