She lied to me.

I didn’t recognise it at the time, but my team manager had been telling me lies from the very first day I joined her PropNex division as a realtor back in 2008.

She pulled me aside in her office early one day and said to me:

You’ve got to work harder than the next agent!

I was brand new, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Besides, I had recently quit MLM after failing miserably at it. I thought Property was a different animal, because this time I had a leader personally guiding me.

So I thought I should actually listen carefully to her. I didn’t really have much confidence in myself at that time, because I hardly had true, real sales experience. Truth be told, hard selling while in MLM to my friends and their families had broken off almost all my friendships. No one was answering my calls anymore. I had few friends left. This left me feeling depressed and I was constantly worrying about what people would think about me as a salesman.

But because I was starting my property agent career from scratch, and also without a job as a support, I struggled to reach my upline’s HDB HUB office daily. I was honestly embarrassed to ask my hard working, civil servant mother for money for daily transport. So my upline advised me to come down to her office only for team meetings, closings and submitting sales documents.

But honestly, I found the team meetings to be a total waste of my time and transport money. Most of the time the other agents were complaining about their clients (if they had clients) or complaining about money (if they didn’t). That was when I witnessed that my upline was busy half the time fighting fires and the other half chasing her downlines. But since I showed initiative and was willing to learn, she took me under her wing to groom me further as a realtor.

So for the next 6 months as a full time agent, I did everything she told me to do:

• Called my friends and family (the ones I hadn’t spammed yet) asking if they needed help selling houses (most didn’t, but I got 1 rental worth $700)
• Threw 1,000+ flyers at the MRT every day for 3 months straight (0 calls)
• Knocked on hundreds of HDB doors running up, down & around my estate
• Attended many networking events as an excuse to chat up total strangers
• Ran ads on Straits Times using borrowed money (7 calls, but no closings)

But after doing all the above for six months straight, I got severely burnt out working crazy 16-hour days, including weekends & Public Holidays.

I just didn’t have the stamina or the motivation any more.

That was the day I realised that, hey, working hard was actually a big, fat lie.

I doubt if I would have found the time to even enjoy whatever little money I earned, but the embarrassing, cold, hard truth is that I hardly earned much.

Hard work + low income = burnout

I ended up hated selling and almost wanted to quit being an agent.

But there were other lies too that I frequently heard as an agent:

1. It’s a Number’s Game. (NO, it’s not. Not when you know what you’re doing.)
2. You’ve got to be prospecting ALL the time. (NO, you don’t. Using what I teach, my agents never do that again. Ever.)
3. Time is limited. (Yes, it is, as long as you are the only one doing every damn thing!)
4. You must be on-call 24/7/365 as an agent, as you never know when a prospect will call you to close. (I don’t know about you, but I never want to be interrupted while spending quality time with my wife and two kids.)
5. If they know you, they will call you. (Really? Who are you fooling? YOU!)
6. You need a good team leader. (Oh, please! Personality cult is the real reason why entire 300-strong divisions leave PropNex to join ERA. It’s nothing more than a vain popularity contest for agents with big egos but small ideas.)

In truth, what really happened to me as an agent was this:

Failure = (few leads) + (no closings) + (bad advice) + no income + hard work x long hours x burnout

So I got tired of hearing these lies all the time. Even my own agents believed them.

That’s why I wrote a new book exposing such lies that every upline tells their agents all the time.

It’s called Property Agent Secrets. It uncovers the layers and layers of B.S. surrounding the Singapore real estate industry. And it turns the failure equation I wrote above totally upside down on its head.

In my book, I take a deep dive and explain everything in much greater detail.

You’ll never again accept a lie from another property agent, especially your upline.

I wish I had this book as my guide back when I was a new agent myself.

Want a FREE copy?

Let me know, but you’ll have to pay for shipping in Singapore. Fair enough?

Get more exclusive real estate agent training here 👉 https://www.yasserkhan.sg/👈

Learn How To Get More Real Estate Leads, More Listings, More Sales, with Less Resistance AND still have a LIFE!

Yasser Khan is a real estate coach, speaker, and trainer at YasserKhan.SG who teaches Singapore Realtors how to make more Money, have more Time and enjoy more Freedom.