No Bitterness
A real story. From my case files. Names changed to protect privacy.
It was Deepavali. 6 pm. Light drizzle.
I was there to take back a rental townhouse.
The backstory is a little tangled, the way rental situations often are.
A master tenant. A subtenant. A lease that had technically ended two days earlier.
The master tenant had already left the country, handed the keys to the subtenant, a Singaporean family of three, and asked them to return the house to me.
Fong was the subtenant.
The two-day delay wasn’t their fault. Fong’s new landlord at a different place had changed his mind at the last minute. Decided not to honour the room rental agreement he’d already signed. So they had nowhere to go.
My landlord, to her credit, gave them the extra days without a fuss.
By the time I arrived, they had found something. A common room nearby. Enough.
Fong was loading the last of his belongings into a minivan parked outside.
We exchanged greetings. Chatted for a few minutes. He was matter-of-fact about it all. No bitterness. No complaints. Just a man finishing a job, getting ready to move on to the next thing.
Then I noticed his wife and daughter.
The daughter was eight. They were standing slightly apart from the packing, deep in conversation. Heads close together. Smiling. The kind of smiling that has nothing to do with circumstances and everything to do with each other.
I listened for a moment without meaning to.
They were talking about the new place.
What would it be like?
Which corner would the daughter put her things?
Small things. Happy things.
This family moved often. Room to room, rental to rental, never staying long in one place before having to pack up and start again. Everything they owned was in that minivan.
No permanent home. No fixed address to write down without a second thought.
In Singapore, that is not a small thing.
In a country where home ownership is almost a civic religion, where your postal district quietly tells people something about you, where the HDB flat is the first rung of a ladder almost everyone expects to climb, not having that footing is to exist slightly outside the script.
And yet.
There was no grief in that minivan. No tension in the way the three of them moved around each other. No exhaustion behind the eyes that you sometimes see in families who have been ground down by circumstances long enough that they’ve stopped pretending otherwise.
They just looked like themselves. Complete. Unbothered by what they didn’t have.
Fong finished loading. He looked around, the way you do when you’re checking you haven’t left anything behind. Then he noticed the other room occupier, a foreign worker who had also been staying in the house. Standing outside in the drizzle.
He turned to his daughter.
Make some space for uncle to sit.
We’ll give him a lift.
She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t make a face. Just shifted her things over, patted the seat, and smiled at the man climbing in.
Tight squeeze. Didn’t matter.
They said goodbye. Drove off into the drizzle.
I stood there for a moment after they left.
I do this work every day. I deal in per square foot, lease terms, option fees, fair market value. I help people find homes and leave homes. Most of the time, the home is the point.
That evening, I watched a family with no permanent home drive away. And they were the most settled people I’d seen all week.
Not because they had figured something out that the rest of us haven’t.
Just because they had each other, and they knew it, and that was enough to make a tight minivan in the rain feel like somewhere to be.
I think about that daughter sometimes. How she moved her things over without being asked twice. How she smiled at a stranger getting into her seat.
Nobody taught her that in the last five minutes. That came from somewhere. From a family that had been squeezed before and learned, together, that it wasn’t the end of anything.
Most of us spend our lives waiting for a moment of stillness. A break in the noise. A morning where we wake up and, just for a second, nothing is wrong.
That family didn’t seem to be waiting for anything.
I’ve since sold that house. I won’t be going back.
But that evening, with the drizzle, the minivan, and the little girl shifting over without a second thought, I don’t think I’ll forget it.
If you’re navigating a difficult housing situation, such as a sale that fell through or a move that came apart at the last moment, you’re welcome to reach out. Sometimes you just need someone who’s seen it before.
WHAT BRINGS YOU HERE TODAY?
Are you wondering what to do in today’s market?
Perhaps you already have a clear mind of what you want to do?
In my blog, I often share stories of the challenges, triumphs, and lessons learned in my work as a real estate agent in Singapore.
Regardless of your situation, you can use me as a sounding board. I’ll provide perspective and clarity from my experience to help you make the most appropriate real estate decision in 2026.
