Mr Raymond Lung has been in the estate agency business for over eight years and now runs his own practice.

Raymond entered the agency field by sheer chance. Back in the summer of 1994 he was still an undergraduate with another few months to go before obtaining his degree. It was vacation time and he was looking for a summer job to help substantiate his holiday expenditure. He saw the recruitment advertisement of an estate agency company in a newspaper, sent in an application, and was hired after an interview. While he had hoped to stay there for only a couple of months, the company put him through a vigorous training programme for new recruits which lasted for two and a half months. By the time the training programme was over the new term was due to begin and he had to return to campus within a month. However, he managed to achieve one sale and one tenancy during this short time and this was much appreciated by the management of the company.

Raymond went back to the university to continue with his studies. By January 1995 he had obtained all the credits required for graduation, and returned to the estate agency company where he was an employee before. Since he had a degree he was posted to the Luxury Properties Section. On account of his outstanding performance, he was promoted to the rank of Branch Manager nine months later and was assigned to take charge of a newly opened branch.

At the end of 1996 he left the company to start his own estate agency practice, specialising in high worth properties.

The summer job was just one of the two major factors that prompted Raymond to develop a career in estate agency, the other being parental influence. According to Mr Lung, his family was not rich and, when he was young, his parents spent their hard-earned savings of $200,000 on a unit in a tenement building. When the building was earmarked for redevelopment, the unit was sold at a profit of over $600,000. This incident came as a revelation to Raymond, which was that only high worth business deals could yield high return, and property transactions were necessarily business deals involving large amounts of money. And, in the real estate market, there can be no doubt that luxury properties would produce the highest yield.

When asked whether university graduates would have an edge over others in the estate agency business, Raymond indicated that while graduates would normally have a better command of the languages than school-leavers, the other advantages they enjoyed might not be apparent within a short time. However, those who had had a higher education would have been trained to learn and analyse methodically, and these would become important tools as an estate agent progressed and learnt in the course of his career development. In his case, he would not have been posted to the Luxury Property Section if he was not a university graduate, and his career might have taken a very different course.

So what did he think should the estate agent possess in order to achieve success? Raymond suggested that a practitioner should respect, love and enjoy his calling in the first place. And he must also be in possession of initiative, enthusiasm and creativity in good measure. In his contact with the clients, he should be polite without being at the expense of his dignity. While an agent should respect the views of the client, he must also be able to maintain and defend his own professional opinions. An estate agent must be clever and astute without being crafty, for it would be hard to expect the client to place his trust in a crafty agent. Apart from these, it is also essential that the agent should do his best to protect the interest and privacy of the client.

Raymond's advice to young people who have a mind to joining the estate agency industry is that they should aim at medium and small companies in the first instance, where they may learn about the trade more comprehensively, and where the opportunities for development are more readily available. Furthermore, new entrants to the trade should avoid participating in the sale of first-hand properties as client respect is hard to come by in this line of work. This will adversely affect a young practitioner's self-esteem and cast a shadow on his future endeavours. Furthermore, many of the standard activities of the estate agent do not feature in the first-hand market, which renders it unfavourable as a training ground for new entrants.

Raymond concluded by saying that although the property market nowadays could not compare with what it was a few years ago, it would still be a field where careers might be profitably pursued. He believed that sincerity and professional knowledge were still the two main virtues for estate agents and that a practitioner observing these virtues in his services to the clients should have no problem in achieving distinguished results.