Eighteen years, five estates, one appointments desk.

I did not come to this from sales. From 2002 to 2008 I ran the appointments desk at a polyclinic on Hougang Avenue 3, and almost everything I am any good at now, I learned in that room. How to read a form properly. How to say a number out loud to someone who does not want to hear it. How to tell the difference between a person who is asking a question and a person who is frightened and asking a question instead.

The flat that changed it was my aunt’s — a three-room in Hougang she had lived in since 1979. It had been listed for five months by an agent who never once came at a time she was actually home, and it was not selling, and she had begun to believe the flat was the problem. It was not. The photographs had been taken at eleven in the morning with the curtains open and the whole place looked like a corridor. I took my own that evening with her lamps on, wrote the listing myself, and it went in six weeks.

A flat photographed at eleven in the morning is a floor plan. A flat photographed at seven in the evening is somewhere a person lives.

I sat for the licence that year and I have worked the same five estates ever since: Serangoon, Kovan, Hougang, Sengkang and Punggol. People assume that is a limitation and it is the opposite. Two hundred and twenty-four handovers inside a few square kilometres means I am not guessing. I know which blocks get the afternoon sun full in the face and which ones have the lift lobby that echoes, which side of Hougang Avenue 8 hears the expressway on a still night, and what a corner unit is genuinely worth against the identical unit two doors down that is not on a corner.

What I tell sellers

The number comes before the flattery.

The first thing you get from me is not a valuation certificate and not a compliment. It is the price I believe your home will actually close at, printed alongside the transactions I derived it from, so you can check my arithmetic rather than trust my face.

Sometimes that number is lower than the one you were given the week before by someone who wanted the listing. I would rather lose it there, on the first evening, than win it and spend the next four months quietly walking you down to the same figure while your listing goes stale in front of the whole estate. A home that has been sitting for eleven weeks is not just unsold. It is marked.

What I tell buyers

Go back at night, and go without me.

Every buyer I take gets a second viewing after dark, and I will happily wait downstairs for it. The things that decide whether you are happy in a flat three years from now do not show up at a two o’clock appointment: the corridor at nine, whether the bedroom is still warm from the west sun at eight, how far the lift is when you are carrying a sleeping child, what the void deck sounds like on a Friday.

I will also tell you when the answer is no. Four of the eleven flats I showed one couple in 2024, I talked them out of — one of them mine to sell. It cost me a commission and it is the reason their neighbour called me a year later.

Six in ten of my clients came from someone I had already worked for, or someone they sent.

2008–2026 · 224 handovers

Three things I will not do

The short list.

I will not take a listing at a price I cannot defend with transactions. I will not work outside the five estates, because the moment I do I am guessing and you are paying for the guess. And I will not photograph a home at two in the afternoon.

Everything else is negotiable. Ask me anything, including what your block did last month, and including whether you should be selling at all this year. Most of the conversations I have never become a transaction, which is the point.