Sue Hayman is a veteran estate agent who began her professional career in the United Kingdom. She moved to Hong Kong six years ago and, after spending some time promoting British properties to the local market, set up her own real estate agency business with two partners. Here she speaks to our correspondent and shares some of her thoughts as a practitioner in Hong Kong.

Sue Hayman: "It is important to build up a reputation among clients to that business may be generated through networking and word of mouth."

Sue operates a practice that specialises in providing a full range of services to expatriates setting up homes in Hong Kong. While the core business has always been the purveying of rental properties, Sue and her colleagues offer assistance to clients in the myriad activities involved in relocating to Hong Kong, especially families with school-age children. Knowing that many of her clients would be setting up home for the first time in Asia, she would, having received agency instruction from the employers of these clients, correspond with the clients beforehand to ascertain their needs and preferences. And when her clients arrive in Hong Kong, her work will not only involve showing properties but helping them to settle in and put the children to school.

In such a business setting it is natural that the estate agent must be helpful, friendly, and quick to understand the needs of the client. It is also important that he or she has fairly extensive knowledge of a wide range of subjects related to home-making, children's education, and other matters conducive to the client's convenience and comfort in a new home. While these are the qualities that Sue looks for when recruiting new staff, no one can say that they are not useful assets to any estate agent, whoever the clients he serves and the location where he operates. Conscientious pre-transaction research and good post-transaction services seldom fail to win the heart of the client.

Dora Hui (Middle): "One has to serve one's clients in full consciousness of one's social and moral responsibility."

Ms Hui brought out a magazine last year which she distributed to all the shops in that shopping centre. The magazine, which aims at raising the sense of belonging among shop-keepers in the centre, has an innovative but homey outlook. She also takes initiative in organising festival activities in the centre during major holidays such as Christmas and the New Year. She told us that such activities had no direct connection with her business and required the time and effort of her and her colleagues, but her community spirit had urged her to go on : she found it very rewarding to be able to help enhance the sense of belonging among fellow shop-operators in the centre. She jokingly admitted that many in the centre had mistaken her shop for the management office, and sought her help when looking for missing children!

In a career in estate agency for over a decade, Ms Hui has witnessed depression in the real estate market a number of times, but she has never seen anything as serious and sustained as it is now. She was frank and told us that her business had been affected although she had had no plan to cut the number of staff members or their salaries. The several employees in her company have worked there for a long time and there is a lot of affection between her and her staff. Ms Hui sees her staff as her precious assets, for it takes a lot of effort and no little time to train an agent and help him build up the all-important network of clients. She thinks that employers should be very cautious when contemplating staff or salary cuts as the money saved may not necessarily compensate for the loss of staff morale.

Ms Hui refuses to accept the view, held by some practitioners, that estate agency is just a common trade and there is no need for it to be elaborated to professional status. She believes that estate agents serve their clients with their unique knowledge and, as such, are professionals. She said that even before the establishment of the EAA, she already had the idea that the trade should be subject to regulation by an independent body. Her point was that in the past many estate agents saw themselves as mere middlemen, and practised the trade as a side job. For these people it was only natural that they were either unwilling or unable to survive in a trading environment that has become structured and regulated. She also pointed out that, for the trade to be professionalised, it would be quite inevitable that some practitioners had to be displaced.