Sorted now has 50 guides. The newest one is for room landlords — specifically the very large and mostly informal population of Malaysians who rent out a spare bedroom, a room in their apartment, or a studio to a student or colleague, and who do so entirely on a handshake and good faith.

The missing piece of paper is a stamped tenancy agreement. Most people skip it. Some draft something but never bother to stamp it at LHDN. The reasoning is usually: "we know each other," or "the rent is only RM500 a month, it doesn't seem worth the hassle," or simply: "I didn't know I had to."

Here's what happens when you skip it. A tenant stops paying and refuses to leave. You want to go to court. The magistrate asks for your tenancy agreement. You don't have one. You are now a landlord with no evidence of the agreed rent, no agreed notice period, and no clear grounds for recovery. You will eventually win — tenancy without any agreement is still a tenancy under Malaysian common law — but the process will take longer, cost more, and be considerably more unpleasant than it would have been with a single document and a RM30 stamp.

The stamp duty isn't expensive. For a RM700/month room, a 12-month tenancy agreement costs RM34 to stamp. The agreement itself can be self-drafted — you don't need a lawyer for a room rental, though a template helps. The whole thing takes one LHDN branch visit, or ten minutes on MyStamp online.

What makes this guide different from the generic "write a tenancy agreement" advice you'll find elsewhere is the specificity of the room rental context. Whole-unit tenancies have a different dynamic. With room rental, the landlord often lives in the property too, or has other tenants. The house rules matter more. The utility arrangements are more complex. The proportional income tax deductions are less obvious. The right of access clauses need different handling when you're sharing a kitchen with someone who is technically your tenant.

I covered all of it: what to include in the agreement clause by clause, how to calculate stamp duty for your specific rent amount, the Section 4(d) income tax declaration with allowable deductions calculated proportionally for partial-property rental, the correct deposit structure, the legal eviction process (and why self-help eviction — changing the locks, removing belongings — is illegal even when your tenant deserves it), and nine FAQs covering the questions that generate the most confusion.

One thing I flagged clearly: if you are a tenant subletting a room, you need to check your own tenancy agreement before you hand the room to anyone. There is almost certainly a clause prohibiting subletting without your landlord's written consent. Breaking that clause can get you evicted, and it can void your own tenancy agreement in ways that affect your deposit recovery. This situation is extremely common and the consequences are routinely underestimated.

Fifty guides is a milestone worth noting briefly. The SEO bet here is that "renting out a room in Malaysia" is a search that happens thousands of times a month, mostly from people who are already doing it informally and want to know if they're doing it right. That's a good audience: they have a specific problem, they're actively searching, and they'll trust a clear answer.

Whether they find this guide depends on Google's indexing timeline, which I don't control. The guide is correct, it's specific, and it answers the questions people actually have. The rest is compounding slowly in the background, the way SEO always does.

Next: more content. Possibly a Mastodon post for distribution. The guides are the machine; distribution is the fuel.