What can real estate agents do about a soft property market?

They can sell more than they did a year ago, says MIP Properties Sdn Bhd senior negotiator Chong Teck Seng.

“When they don’t have sales, a lot of agents will blame the market or the property owner. But at MIP, our culture is that we never blame anyone; it is really all about yourself,” says Chong.

MIP Properties — which stands for motivation, integrity and professionalism — was founded in 2006 by principal Alan Kuan. It currently has about 80 agents under its umbrella.

Chong, an unlikely veteran at 27, joined the agency in late-2011. He's president of MIP Properties Trainers Club, the agency’s training centre, that was set up in 2012 by Kuan to “uphold the standards of MIP Properties real estate agents”.

All the club’s trainers are drawn from MIP Properties’ agents, and it's run by 12 members, all below 30 years old.

“We design and create our own training programmes,” he says with some pride.”

This year, they’ve come up with something they call ‘Impact’, a role-play training programme conducted on weekdays from 8am to 9am. The club trains two groups of 20 trainees on a bi-weekly basis.

‘Impact’ trains an agent to find clients, inspect a property, make presentations and, importantly, close the deal. Trainees get to switch roles between agent and buyer to assess their peers’ performance.

“Just like sports, before you go out for competition, you have friendly matches. That’s the idea — friendly matches within the company first,” says Chong.

There are two other training programmes‘Supercharge’ sees motivational talks given by the agency’s top achievers, and ‘Edge’ involves learning novel skills, such as making optimal use of social media for real estate matters.

There’s also monthly training for agents to become future trainers.

They must be doing right. There are plans to spin off MIP Trainers’ Club into a separate entity from the agency to offer training courses to outsiders.

From advertising to real estate

Chong worked with international advertising agency Draftfcb Sdn Bhd as an account executive for two years before jumping feet first into real estate.

He joined MIP because he was influenced by his friend, Kenny Sim, a law graduate who'd joined the same agency two years earlier. Sim is now a project team leader in MIP. Chong covers mainly the Mont’Kiara area in Kuala Lumpur and draws inspiration from Sim’s successful career transition from law to real estate.

“I have this vision to change the entire industry and how people look at us. Many [of us] are not professional and just want to take money and run — no customer service, no follow up,” he says.

Sim and MIP principal Kuan are his biggest influences in his career so far. They’ve showed him it’s never impossible to keep learning.

“When you stop training or learning, you basically stop growing,” Chong says.

The flipside of flexi hours

Some of Chong’s new recruits think being a property agent allows for flexible working hours — which is true — only to be brought back down to earth when they realise they have to work longer hours than with a nine-to-five job.

“A lot of agents treat this as a regular job; they don’t see it as a professional career… It is about building relationships because it is a people business. I always tell them they must read newspapers, magazines; gather knowledge and information that helps you have an edge over others.”

Do something different to cultivate your unique selling point, he says, or you’ll have to be content with being one of the sheep with limited pasture.

He observes that younger agents do not appreciate the value of training, and he doesn’t get paid to be a trainer. So why does he do it?

“To be a successful property agent is not about making money; it is about character building. In five to seven years down the road, I can be a professional speaker or trainer in the real estate industry,” he says.

For now, he's sharpening his knowledge and public speaking skills as he trains others.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going

Malaysia is not short of property projects. As new ones get completed and new properties come on stream, so does the secondary market turn more competitive, leading to innovation. Chong’s clients are becoming more receptive to new ideas for marketing their properties.

“Especially at the end of last year, we saw a change. The secondary market is still very active but there is now more choice in the [primary] market,” he says.

“Homeowners or sellers find it tougher to sell [and] start to listen to you. They want agents who care; someone who can tell them about transaction [history] or the highest price that can be achieved.”

An agent’s success boils down to how an individual adapts himself to the market, not vice versa, Chong asserts.

“We came up with the ‘Impact’ training to be in line with the market. We never blame the market. Even if the market is slow, people will still buy…”

This article first appeared in property+, a section of the digitaledge Daily, on Aug 7, 2015. Download property+ here.