A Rookie’s Passion for Learning, Urban Planning and People

Nov 2024 - 4 min read

Ching Chia might be a rookie real estate salesperson (RES) who joined the industry for barely a year, but she already has several Top Achiever awards to her name.

And to top it off, she won the Rookies Award at the Singapore Estate Agents Association (SEAA) Awards 2024 in August.

The Associate Senior Sales Director at SRI Pte Ltd said: “I am so grateful to win the award. It is a fantastic recognition of the hard work I have put in the past year, especially as a new RES.”

The SEAA Award is quite an achievement for a newcomer whose LinkedIn profile lists herself as an “urbanist turned realtor”.

(An urbanist refers to someone who is an advocate or an expert in urban planning.)

Ching said: “As an urbanist, I love cities, placemaking, design, people, and I firmly believe that good urban planning will always bring diversity, life and energy to the city, kind of like certain parts of Singapore like Joo Chiat. I am of course biased towards the East!”

She brings along almost 15 years of experience as an urban planner and a researcher in the built environment sector, and remains passionate about how good urban planning can transform a town, city and country through the way people interact with the urban environment.

Ching made the mid-career switch for a variety of reasons, including the need for greater flexibility and more time for her family, coming out of her comfort zone to explore a different career path away from academia.

She jokingly said: “Going into real estate was not a difficult transition, although some may see it as going over to the ‘dark side’.”

Ching now juggles her new career with her passion for community-building work and advocacy that she has been doing in Singapore over the past decade.

But life as an RES can often be challenging.

Barely four months into her new career, she had a baptism of fire: Managing a string of inter-connected property transactions among three different clients that had to be completed within a six-month timeframe.

“It was an incredibly stressful but exciting period for me as a new RES to manage several timelines together, and I am so glad that everything went without a hitch. I was incredibly stressed and anxious the entire period, but I learnt so much in the process!”

As a rookie in this industry, how do you keep up with the changes in the industry such as new rules and regulations?

I love reading about current affairs, politics, and news on real estate in Singapore.

I also keep up by attending Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses to ensure that I am kept up-to-update with any new industry guidelines or regulations, and discuss them with my team.

How did you reach out as a rookie RES to new clients and convince them to let you market their properties?

I started off with creating a lot of content, especially videos, on Instagram around resale properties, even though I was not the sole marketing RES for many of these listings at the start.

I guess my content started to gain eyeballs within my personal network, which eventually also reached people outside my personal network.

Within a few months, I had friends and people outside my personal network who reached out to ask me if I would be keen to either help them buy, sell, or rent properties.

How has the journey as an RES been for you so far?

I am very grateful to be doing well in real estate, and I understand that not everyone has had the same experience. It has been a reasonably smooth journey, even though it is also a very fast-moving industry that requires a lot of commitment that can be stressful and cause quite a fair bit of anxiety.

I have been very fortunate to have a good relationship with clients who also introduced me to their friends and family, with many becoming my friends too!

In your opinion, how can RESs stay future-proof in the face of technology disruption and increased expectations from property consumers?

Not only do we have to constantly upskill through attending courses to gain new knowledge, but also to read widely. We need to learn to be extremely adaptable, and be able to negotiate and present well.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can only get us so far, but the human touch we bring to the table is something that can never be replaced by technology!

Real estate sales is now no longer about simply selling properties. It is also about learning how to market yourself and create content on social media.

In my case I taught myself how to edit videos. Being able to edit my own real estate videos has come in handy, and also saved me a lot of money, even though it is very time-consuming.

This is the third of four winner profiles for the SEAA Awards 2024 that CEAnergy is featuring, highlighting the qualities and skills that are important for RESs to possess.

Information accurate as at 4 Nov 2024