Why Your Agency IPO Dream Is Still Just a Dream 20 Years Later
I've had coffee with countless real estate agency bosses. And when the guard drops, the conversation always circles back to the "End Game."
The dreams are familiar:
- “We’re going for an IPO.”
- “We’ll pivot into development.”
- “We’re expanding into Singapore, Vietnam, Dubai.”
To support these dreams, they show me their “strategic plans”:
- more branches
- more recruitment
- more proprietary tech
- more partner tie-ups
- more “family culture”
But once you strip away the branding colors and office renovations, every plan has the same DNA:
A volume-based sales machine running on transient labour. And because the model is identical, the nightmare is identical.
The Great Recruitment Treadmill
No matter how grand the vision, 99% of agency bosses live in a constant cycle of panic over Recruitment and Retention.
It goes like this:
You spend years grooming a top Team Leader. That leader gets a better offer—or a bigger ego—from a rival. They leave and take 20 performing agents.
Revenue drops. Forecasts collapse. The IPO plan goes back into the drawer.
You return to zero:
Recruit again. Train again. Motivate again. Beg again.
The CEO, who should be designing an asymmetric takeover strategy, becomes a glorified cheerleader + crisis manager, trying to convince 25-year-olds not to resign.
The PE 2 Verdict
This is the tragedy of the traditional agency model.
You can grind for 20 years. You can win national awards. You can earn titles. But when investors value your business, the reality is brutal:
Most Malaysian agencies trade at a Price-to-Earnings ratio of 2 or below. Why?
Because the market knows the truth:
- Your assets walk out the door every evening.
- You don’t own a system; you own a dependency cycle.
- Your revenue falls 50% if recruitment pauses for six months.
That is not a business. That is a high-stress cashflow activity.
The 20-Year Illusion
Many bosses wake up after two decades and realise:
- They’re not any closer to an IPO.
- They’re not any closer to becoming developers.
- They're not even closer to systemising the company.
They’ve just completed the same lap around the track, twenty times. They’ve confused activity with equity. Because if your master plan is still:
“More agents → Sell more units → Grow revenue,”
then you’re not building a platform. You’re building a bigger hamster wheel.
And until the architecture of the business fundamentally changes, the valuation won’t change. The PE 2 ceiling remains unbreakable. And the IPO remains a hallucination.
Meanwhile, the panic over the next resignation letter remains the only thing that’s real.
