The Accidental Realtor
SkillsFuture expiring near future
The government introduced a one-off $500 Skillsfuture Credit top-up in 2020 that was set to expire by 31 December 2025. So towards the end of 2025, I was twiddling fingers thinking what to do with that. See these credits are taxpayers’ contributions, and I’ve heard people going for wine-appreciation courses, mooncake making courses, crocheting courses… which in my opinion, what a mad waste of money that I’ve contributed to.
So as I scrolled through the extensive list of courses, the Real Estate Salesperson course feels most useful. I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life in advertising, and a huge chunk of it was with real estate developers. So I’ve scraped the surface, but never into details. There are alot of skillsets that can benefit me, but most things can be learned from Youtube or Coursera. And with the advent of AI, many less-specialised disciplines can be self-taught. Real estate is something I'm interested in, that requires a bit of math, a bit of legal knowledge, some data science, and also some level of understanding on government policies.
However, I have grossly underestimated the course. It is notoriously difficult, with a 60% passing mark and a rumoured bell curve. The Council of Estate Agency has aggressively increased the barrier to entry into this industry by the introduction of 2 Real Estate Salesperson examinations, which, in my opinion, are unnecessarily difficult. It almost seems like a culling of the new agent population.
Intellectual Deflation
To be fair, the Real Estate Salesperson examinations were introduced in 2010, and it was a piece of cake. Just a matter of going through 10-year-series questions 2 days before the exams would suffice. How do I know? I took them. Out of sheer boredom and camaraderie. Yea, I accompanied a friend in my hot pursuit of her attention. Nonetheless, I never practised as an agent, and allowed the license to lapse into oblivion. This time round, however, I noticed the curriculum has gone absolutely bonkers. The difficulty has consistently risen over the years.
An example of a mathematical question was one where, you were given the purchase date and price of a property, and asked if the buyer sells on this date, how much cash proceeds will he have for his next purchase. You’ll have to factor in the agent and legal fees, seller’s stamp duty, buyer’s stamp duty, both tables of values derived from memory, and some. Keep in mind that these aren’t the only details that you need to commit to memory. An interesting one is, in a residential property transaction, should you and your property agent wish to include mutually agreeable terms and conditions that are not in CEA’s Prescribed Estate Agency Agreement, these additional terms should be added in the space provided or on a separate pink sheet of paper1. Pink.
In one question on legal knowledge, it asked of a scenario where the husband is the sole income-earner and property owner, but the wife lives in the house. Is there a resulting trust formed, or was there a proprietary estoppel? Looking back, I probably got this one wrong.
By sheer determination and alcoholic abstinence, I managed to pass the 2 papers in 1 sitting. Quite a feat for an old brain. They say our brains are sponges, and mine was probably worn dense over the decades. I have so much newfound respect for the realtors these days. Gone is the cowboy town when estate agents were flipping options for a quick buck.
Parking
The next step is to select an agency to ‘park’ your license under. It seemed pretty homogeneous to me. But I decided to find a complicated solution to a non-problem. I pulled some data from data.gov.sg to check out how each agency was doing, and below are the top 5 by agent volume (yes, reducing agents to just numbers).
Below is a table of the 5 biggest agencies.
Agency | Number of Agents | Market Share | Active Agents2 | % Active Agents3 | % Total Txns³ | % HDB secondary sales | % Private Sales | % Landed Sales | % Rentals |
PROPNEX REALTY PTE. LTD. | 14554 | 39.56% | 3842 | 36.78% | 36.29% | 40.42% | 38.97% | 35.09% | 34.69% |
ERA REALTY NETWORK PTE LTD | 8744 | 23.77% | 2335 | 22.35% |
Source: data.gov.sg
2 Active agents are agents with transactions between 1 Jan - 30 Jun 2026.
3 Transactions include sales and rentals. Only accounts for private home transactions and HDB secondary transactions.
I over-engineered it further by looking into the annual reports of the 2 listed giants. The annual profits differed by quite a margin, and the message from the respective leaders also resonated differently. I must say that I have not put enough thought into this to be able to comment further, but I ultimately made my mind up after watching videos of random agents from each agency. If you start searching for them, you will hear a lot of ‘This is how much it costs to own a blah blah blah…’, and Youtube videos with agents with exaggerated emotions 😱 on the thumbnail.
Ultimately, like most decisions I make, I went with my gut feel. A gut feel is when your research steers you in one direction, but isn't enough to be empirically conclusive. If you have recently passed your RES, I can share more of my thoughts with you, but as a rookie of course… I have no interest in recruitment now, so just buy me beers.
1 https://www.cea.gov.sg/consumers/engaging-a-property-agent/buying-or-selling/