"Yasser, why don't you become a realtor yourself and make millions? Why are you coaching realtors?"

Said more than one sceptical agent to me in the past.

Well, I don't blame them. They might have gotten ripped off by some 'guru' who promised them millions but then disappeared.

They're right to be suspicious

Scammers are everywhere. The other day, one of my agents got scammed too. It's a scary world out there. Scammers are smarter and more sophisticated than ever before. That's why some agents think that coaching is a scam too.

But they are only half right

I resisted getting coached by a mentor for years.

I suspected that most coaches only want to make money off you and deeply resented the fact that they usually had an ulterior motive for wanting to help me out.

I also witnessed my upline's division boss favouring property agents with better sales performance over me, and I remember feeling a sense of unfairness at the time. It was just like the rich getting richer while the poor staying poorer.

But I realised that having the right mentor was actually a much better shortcut than trying to figure things out blindly, without a GPS and getting knocked hard into unseen walls. Sure, there were mediocre coaches who sold only motivation, but I wanted someone who had been there before me, faced the exact same challenges as me and then successfully overcame them.

In short, a coach got me results much faster than I could on my own.

Why?

You Don't Know What You Don't Know!

Because you don't know what you don't know!

Only a coach could see my flaws that I was blind to.

I was too close to myself to see my own flaws! I needed a mirror to see myself; a mentor was that mirror.

And once I found one such mentor, it took me only 6 weeks to triple my results, where previously I had been struggling for years, stumbling  around on my own.

He rapidly accelerated the time to see real results. So, having the right coach to shortcut your journey matters a lot!

Here's Something Personal

I was never told I was special.

I was never told I could have anything I want in life.

I was put down more often than I was praised for something.

I never learnt what I was good at in school.

(In fact, school created more Unanswered Questions than real answers. And honestly, only a tiny 5% out of my 15 years of schooling is still applicable in my daily life today.)

As you go through life, you have to discover all these things by yourself.

We know that as the school of Hard Knocks.

But what many of us still resist, but recognise as the better way, is learning from the successes and failures of others, especially mentors.

It took me a mentor to

Whatever I achieved more than paid for the money I invested in each mentor!

Stop Reinventing the Wheel!

There are 2 things you need:

That's all you need.

Seeing My Agents Succeed Makes My Day!

Nothing gives me more joy than hearing the success of my realtors!

And that's my answer to the question why I coach others now!

I've heard this one before. You may be wondering the same thing too.

After all, just like in Property Guru's case, the first agents to sign up reaped a ton of benefits. That was before their platform got saturated with agents.

You're right to suspect all platforms are the same; that they go cheap to to attract as many agents as possible. Once they have enough users, they raise their prices and suck the agents dry. It's true. Property Guru did that. 99.co may do the same too. (In fact, it might already be doing this.) You just never know with these property portals.

Advertisers like them exist to suck agents dry! And it creates an unfair playing ground where those agents willing or able to spend money on their platform win at the expense of all the rest.

I too felt the exact same way too. But back in 2008, I was overly reliant on google to send me traffic. I was trying to support my mother, because I was the eldest of my siblings and we were going through tough times in those days.

And then suddenly came the infamous 'Google Slap', and then my advertising account got banned for life.

Just like that, a good source of business went down almost overnight. It sent chills down my spine when I discovered that. I just panicked.

The bigger trouble was, I didn't know many people. And I had fewer contacts on my Nokia phone. I wasn't an outgoing person; In fact, I was always shy. It was hard for me to socialise or say the right words at the right time to anyone.

I had it harder than most agents because, not only I grew up overseas for most of my childhood, but I only returned to Singapore in the year 2000. And I completed National Service in 2005. That was barely three years for me to get to know some people! Don't you agree that's not enough time, even for an introvert, right?

So imagine, here I was as a realtor, overly dependent on just one platform for all of my business.

100% at their mercy.

And all those years ago, I discovered something that you may also be realising right now. That these platforms show no mercy! That they only care about money! That to them, we're just nameless numbers! And they're arrogant. And they always get away scott-free after raising their fees! 😡

So you can imagine that I had no other choice but to escape from this problem. I never wanted to be in the same desperate position again! I never wanted to be at their mercy again!

But it wasn't easy though. I reinvested back every penny I had on me into this. And my team of ten developers took 9 long months to do it.

So on the tenth month, I pushed a button and my system was live.

But here's what happened next. I had failed to understand one simple fact: that Google and PropertyGuru were TRAFFIC that I could control, I just didn't own it!

The platform I built was TRAFFIC I OWNED! It was radically different! I could know send my properties and new launches any time I wanted. Why? Because I owned it!

But traffic started somewhere, right? People discovered me on Google or Property Guru right?

And that was how I was able to never again be held hostage by any platform! I could still survive even if Facebook went down! I could still sell houses even if Property Guru went down!

Now, that is POWER, right?

Singapore is so small! What if other agents get to my leads or clients?" I heard this one from one of my agents. Do you find yourself asking this question too? I don't blame you! You may have had your leads and clients stolen by other agents before. Worse, that agent might even be the client's brother, uncle or cousin! That's why you might even suspect that hey, since this is such a small world, there's less business to go around! In short, many agents fall prey to a scarcity mindset. And today, I decided to talk more about that. You're not alone! It had happened to me! I was sitting at home, and I could hear my mum and siblings in the other room talking. They had no idea what had just happened. I was sitting there freaked out because another agent had just stolen away my client, and I had no idea how I was going to get paid. I started to get a shooting pain in my stomach. It felt like a heart attack, but it was lower in my gut. I felt this pressure coming down and I literally felt like someone was sitting on my neck. It got so heavy that I couldn't lift my head. The only thing I could see were the palms of my hands, and they were sweating, yet I was freezing cold. My whole body was shaking and shivering because I was in so much pain and frustration, yet I was frozen with fear. I was now very afraid whenever I felt an agent sniffing around my leads and clients. It took me a long time to overcome this fear. I had become a realtor back in 2008 to support my hard-working mother. After 8 long months, I managed to close my first few deals. And I was doing financially ok. But now, I was having trouble with keeping my leads and clients only to myself. The business that I worked so hard to build was almost breaking up. My business was breaking up. The fear of losing business made me very worried. Was there no end to my struggles? I had barely closed one deal, after months, and now I was back to zero! Unfortunately for me, it wasn't long until I realised that it was a way of life. Clients were fickle creatures. It was a necessary evil of being an agent... Sort of like an occupational hazard that came with the job. I had work to do and an income to earn, so I went back to prospecting and tried hard to steel myself up. Then something shocking happened Time flew until I was 3 years into my business. I learned to live with it. So one day I taken completely by surprise when a previous lead who I thought was dead (that is, wasn't serious), turned up and ended up buying from me. When I looked closer, I realised I had been communicating with them all this while. It was a simple follow up that I had set up all those years ago! Ironically, I was too impatient to close when I was starting out; wishing prospects to buy homes from me. I realised one thing; You can't force people to buy whenever you want them to. They'll only buy when THEY are ready! I had ended up only working with a tiny pool of ready-to-act prospects who were ready to buy NOW. But it was the follow up and nurturing of long term prospects I almost discarded (which suddenly turned to NOW business) that really surprised me! I had discovered what all long timers already knew by painful experience: that every week, there were prospects ready to buy or sell who were not ready last year! Future prospects were turning current every week! I decided to do something about it. I couldn't afford to be shortsighted anymore! Since this was a long-term business, I needed to be PATIENT!

So I created a plan (and that was how my automated follow up strategy was born). I decided I would treat different prospects differently. All ready-to-act prospects would naturally see me in an appointment.

It's 2020, and believe it or not, there are agents out there who are still stuck in the old ways of prospecting (like it's still 1990)!

They keep prospecting, prospecting, prospecting! To them, everyone and anyone is a potential prospect!

And everyone needs their services, right?

What's so wrong about that?

Well, people don't like to be hard sold, but they love to buy!

Step out of your shoes as an agent for a minute, and imagine that you're out shopping for a new suit. You're in Paragon and you see a suit you like. And it's affordable. So now you feel like buying it. But then, suddenly a novice salesman pesters you to buy ties, even though you're not here to buy ties. What do you do? Do you run away when the promoter is too aggressively trying to sell you their new tie collection? Or you would attentively listen to his hard selling sales pitch, loving every single minute of it? You would run away as fast as possible!

Now, why can't those very same realtors, who run away from other hard selling salespeople, still do the same things to others that they wouldn't want others to do to them?! In other words, why do something to others that you don't like to be done to yourself?

Here's the problem with us agents; it's because we're still still stuck in the Old Mindset!

Despite advances in technology, despite the viral nature of social media and despite the massive adoption rates of mobile phones and an explosion in videos, at a time when even Primary school kids are on their mobiles, the average agent is still doing door knocking, cold calling and prospecting. Mindlessly. He's not leveraging those advances in technologies to get their message out to more people in a shorter time for less costs.

But it's not entirely your fault. Every agent and his upline is also doing this, so it's hard to break away from tradition. I certainly used to work like this when I was an active realtor.

Here's a secret I'm willing to share with you today: Pursued Prospects Run Away!

The first time I realised this was when I was still an active agent back in 2008.

I noticed that top agents like PropNex's Mohamed Ismail were never busy prospecting for new business; they were busy servicing their clients. That's why those happy clients referred them more often. When I had that 'aha!' moment, it made total sense to me!

Because I realised, the real reason I was struggling in those days was because I was a new agent with no experience, it was because I spent ALL of my time only prospecting! I was hardly servicing my existing clients, and therefore, I only did a mediocre job of that! Bye bye referrals...

The minute I realised that, my focus shifted! Instead of 'me! me! me!', I had to come from a position of giving!

And when that happened, I had a flood of prospects wanting to buy my listings!

And this is the exact opposite approach to marketing; get prospects to chase you instead of you doing all the chasing.

By reversing the traditional, outbound sales approach, any agent can now attract hungry prospects to them!

No more door knocking! No more cold calling! No more canvassing?

So how do you get started with Reverse Prospecting? You do this in a number of ways:

Do that, and watch your inquiries and closings skyrocket without scrambling for buyers every time your agency has a new launch!

[Summary of Audio Transcript]

Bobby quietly confessed to me, so our upline couldn’t hear this shocking revelation.

This was in late 2009 when I was starting to make money as a realtor in PropNex. The whole 100-strong division under my upline’s boss was gathered for dinner at a Boat Quay seafood restaurant to celebrate the success of team members.

It was the day my colleague Bobby quit real estate for good, never to be seen.

I was genuinely puzzled, because he had struggled for only about 2 months and then had gone on to make money in each of the next 9 months.

I admired him because I thought he was way smarter than me. Because he joined months after me but quickly became my senior.

So I turned to him and asked why he wanted to quit so suddenly.

He said he didn’t like our upline. Couldn’t stand her. He was under tremendous pressure to deliver. And was feeling very overwhelmed with all the big expectations of him.

I wasn’t surprised. I knew my upline set tough sales targets for us.

But I still couldn’t understand the exact problem he had with her.

I didn’t realise it at the time, I was simply cobroking my deals with my upline so I was in her ‘good books’. I was getting flooded with more leads than I could handle. So I had no choice but to pass them around. That made me the ‘favourite’ of our division, never mind the fact that I was pulling my hair out of frustration from wasting so many leads.

I grabbed hold of Bobby and said,

What he confessed next came from his heart and struck me deeply.

He said that there was something wrong with the whole real estate industry:

Bobby’s observations left a deep impact on me that night. Because what he said had confirmed 100% of my very own suspicions.

Nobody had quite expressed it like Bobby did.

He left me golden nuggets of wisdom.

Because by then I was tasting success for the first time and had barely overcome a year of struggles, I did not want to go through the same rubbish again.

So I started gathering whatever good advice I could find. I would go on to apply many of Bobby’s golden nuggets in my own business when I systemised it over the next year.

And recently, I thought of benefiting others too with something that had benefited me.

That’s why I wrote a new book dedicated to Bobby. I wish talented agents still stay on in this industry. I hope my book Property Agent Secrets helps agents with overcoming all of the complaints they have. You just have to pay for shipping when it becomes available for pre orders soon. 

And I'm giving away a free ebook too, revealing the winning Facebook Ads a new realtor used to sell an $8M property in 14 DAYS. Get it NOW!

[Summary of Audio Transcript]

It’s 2019 and I still see many Singapore Realtors making a ton of mistakes.

OK, I’ve made my fair share of embarrassing mistakes in my time too.

And I often wished someone could have warned me before I drove myself silly with regret and frustration. Often, I wasted valuable time correcting errors I could easily have prevented had I been more vigilant.

So, in the spirit of helping fellow agents, here is my list of mistakes that I would have warned my own self if I was a full time realtor today in 2019. 
I have grouped these mistakes according to the categories they belong to:

By the way, this list of mistakes is by no means exhaustive.

This is just the tip of the iceberg that I personally uncovered.

I explain how to solve all the above 39 mistake permanently in my new upcoming book, Property Agent Secrets, with practical, easy-to-follow tips and detailed Action Plans.

You’ll never make these silly mistakes

[Summary of Audio Transcript]

Real Estate training courses often fail to teach agents how to run a REAL business

In Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth, he teaches that business owners are so busy working IN their businesses that they don’t have time to work ON their business.

The entrepreneur who starts the business now finds himself trapped by all the small details required to keep that business afloat.

We property agents are notorious for this.

Most of you chose real estate because you wanted to be your own boss and then quickly found out that you were working for a lunatic… yourself!

The trap you find yourself in is that there is so much to do and you’re the only one doing it!

Now, instead of building an empire, you’re chasing after your ‘To Do List’ and just trying to stay afloat!

The problem with this is that if nothing can happen in your business without you doing it, you don’t really have a business at all.

What you have is a (tough) JOB!

I found myself in the same trap and this is what motivated me to find a better way.

I was determined NOT to have a “job”, and with the creation of my system over a period of 5 years, I succeeded.

So how do you achieve this freedom?

The path to true freedom in your property business is SYSTEMISATION.

Every part of my own agent business was fully systemised, and this is what I teach agents in my new upcoming book.

My Property Agent Secrets book is essentially an instruction manual, much like the manual you get for your car or for your phone: do this, and then do that, and if this happens, do this.

One of my agents I was coaching did a great job of systemising his lead generation.

During the past month, this agent began learning and implementing my advice every day. He has generated over ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY leads in just 30 days and now spends his time on follow up.

Another coaching student sent out 20 direct mailers and got 5 listings, but then got “busy”.

This second student of mine had no “system”.

The stuff that really needed to get done couldn’t happen unless he pulled himself out of the business and made it happen.

That’s a big mistake.

If you allow yourself to become too busy to advertise, what will happen to your business?

(Right, your business will die!)

Unfortunately, traditional training for real estate doesn’t teach this.

Even my veteran agents had to struggle with this concept.

They learned that if they didn’t schedule a time to work ON their business, it just never happened!

That’s very common and you should do exactly what they ended up doing — schedule a specific time.

My book deconstructs this entire process in a very easy-to-follow plan tailored specifically to you.

What a business looks like

The benefits you will get from working ON your business are many.

At the end of the day you will have:

 The more you stop working IN the daily routines of your business that don’t really require you, the more time you will free up to not only work ON the big stuff, but also to take time off (while still getting paid big bucks!)

Now THAT is what a REAL business looks like. 

P.S. I'm opening up pre orders soon.

[Summary of Audio Transcript]

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.

She pulled me aside and said to me:

I was brand new. Besides, I had recently quit MLM. I thought Property was a different animal because this time I had a leader guiding me.

So I thought I should listen to her. I didn’t have much confidence in myself because I hardly had real sales experience. Honestly, hard selling in MLM to my friends and their families had broken off my friendships. No one was answering my calls. I had few friends left. This left me feeling depressed and I was constantly worrying about what people would think about me.

But because I was starting my property agent career from scratch and also without a job, I struggled to reach my upline’s HDB HUB office daily. I was embarrassed to ask my hard working 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 I found the team meetings to be a waste of my time and money. Most of the time they were complaining about their clients (if they had clients) or complaining about money (if they didn’t). 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 as a realtor.

So for the next 6 months, I did everything she told me to do:

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 the motivation any more.

That was the day I realised that hard work 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

2. always be prospecting

3. time is limited

4. you must be on call 24/7

5. they will call you if they know you

6. get a great team leader

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?

[Summarised Audio Transcript] 

I did something weird for a property agent.

I wrote a book. 📖

It’s called Property Agent Secrets.

⏳ And it took me five and a half long years to write.

But some of the lessons I documented in it actually took me decades to learn.

(And my publisher tells me he need two more months to ship the first 500 copies.)

Now, why did I spend so much time creating something that few agents have the time or the patience to read?

Because I wasted two years of my life as a brand new agent doing things that did not work.

Kinda like the 2 energetic years of my youth I gave up for National Service.

(Ok, at least in NS I got paid real money.)

But the failure I suffered was just too embarrassing…

…To the point I sometimes caused myself physical harm.

I banged my head against the wall out of frustration until I felt giddy with nausea.

I can’t remember how many times I punched my fists in rage until it hurt.

I actually prefer to forget the bitter tears I cried in solitude.

(I sometimes even wonder whether or not am I a violent person? I hope not.)

I wished and hoped and prayed someone would have saved me years of learning.

But unfortunately, my faith in people was to be badly shaken.

The heart pain I felt was unbearable precisely because it was born of the depressing realisation that nobody had time for me.

I secretly asked for someone who would show me, step by step, what things I absolutely needed to do to achieve success and things I die die had to avoid in order to prevent humiliating failure.

Someone who had been there, done that and compassionately wished for others to avoid the same horrible experiences that he had endured.

But I never found that ‘someone’, at least not in Singapore real estate.

It was a combination of consolidating secrets from other industries outside real estate and learning my own tough, hard lessons over the years.

This book is my own honest attempt to recreate the mentor that I never had.

It is a warning left by a battle-tested veteran for a new recruit about the hidden dangers he can’t see yet but will have to face inevitably.

I wish I didn’t have to struggle so hard like I did back then.

I wish I could warn my younger self just in time.

I wish I could avoid all of the embarrassment.

And feel 100% confident that real estate doesn’t have to be tough.

Or a struggle.

But some people only learn things the hard way.

The question is, are you one of them?

P.S. Good news! I’m opening up my book pre-orders soon. If you want the book, comment here or reply with ‘yes’.

[Summary of Audio Transcript] One day in 2010, the unthinkable happened.😲

My former upline literally begged me to help her when I bumped into her by chance. I was out shopping when she saw me. She knew I was doing quite well at the time. And she wanted me to help her. She was exhausted after working 16-hour days for too little rewards. Her income had hit a ceiling and she almost wanted to quit.

I said I would look into it. So she agreed.

That day, all the memories started flooding back in. Of how I had struggled to make a living in real estate, the many days I spent going hungry and the agony of blistered feet I endured walking on foot just because I didn’t have the money for transport.

It was my upline who kept me committed all those times I had wanted to quit. But sometimes her well-meaning advice felt off. I didn’t blame her. It was how real estate had been done for the past 100 years. And now she was in the exact same situation I used to be in.

It was funny how the roles were reversed now.🙃 Life has a funny way of giving surprises. But I didn’t envy her.

The next day I went to her Tiong Bahru office. It was much smaller than the one she had in PropNex HDB HUB. And her team of 6 were all part-timers, a far cry from my time. I had prepared a few questions for her beforehand and needed her full attention for a couple of hours. I told her to be completely honest with me.

I started by asking her who was she targeting with her marketing efforts. She said anyone and everyone, as long as someone needed to buy or sell a house.

That reply didn’t impress me. No wonder she was struggling to get leads.  She was spreading herself too thin and wasn’t laser-focused enough.

Next, I asked her what marketing was she currently running for that. She said she was promoting herself in her GTA, hoping to get buyers and sellers to call her. Again, wrong strategy.

She didn’t really know what she was doing and what really worked. She was totally clueless about effective marketing. By now I was already getting a bit worried.😟

So I asked her next, assuming that I was a buyer, why should I choose her instead of the other 34,000+ property agents in Singapore, including buying without an agent and saving myself tens of thousands in commissions?

She couldn’t answer me.

She had hardly thought about this in her entire 10-year career!😱

I knew then, without even a shade of doubt, that she truly needed my help. Fast.

And she couldn’t have approached me at a better time. I had recently finished perfecting my own system in order to help my agent business. It had taken me 16 months and costed six figures.

💡Suddenly, I had a light bulb go off in my head.

What if I shared my own system with her? Would it shorten her learning curve and give her the results she desperately needed? Her problems were the exact ones I struggled with and had managed to overcome . All she had to do was to follow my instructions and actively use the system.

I rushed back to my office and started finding ways to create a similar system for my upline. Once I had something to work with, I went back to her in order to work out an action plan. Once we agreed, she expressed her concerns about the finances. She said she couldn’t afford it. I told her that I was simply paying her back. She didn’t need to worry. All I asked in exchange was her commitment.

 I was more happy for her when she got her first lead than I ever was even for myself. The look of relief and satisfaction on her face were priceless!😌

 And that was the day I realised that, hey, I wanted to see more agents happy like her!

 🙌True success lies in helping others become happier!