All Property Agents Are Beggars. We Don’t Make Money From Beggars: Said the Venture Capital

All Property Agents Are Beggars. We Don't Make Money From Beggars: Said the Venture Capital

A few weeks ago, an investor said something brutally honest to us:

"All property agents are beggars.

We don't make money from beggars."

It sounded offensive.

It felt disrespectful.

But it was not personal.

It was a diagnosis of the industry, not the people in it.

To understand why a venture capitalist would say something so harsh, we must first understand how investors think — and how the traditional Malaysian real estate model looks from their vantage point.

This is not a motivational article.

This is an autopsy of how the market sees the profession — and what must be rebuilt to change it.

1. What Venture Capital Actually Means by "Beggar"

In VC language, "beggar" does not refer to poverty.

It means a person or business that:

does not own a defensible asset
cannot scale without more labour
cannot produce compounding revenue
is dependent on chasing the next transaction
has no proprietary advantage

From an investor's perspective, the traditional Malaysian REN is not a villain.

He is a labour unit inside a broken structure.

Every month, the agent must:

beg for leads
beg owners to trust them
beg buyers not to disappear
beg bankers for loan updates
beg team leaders for listings
beg portals for cheaper ads
beg the market for income

It is not the person who is powerless — it is the model that makes him powerless.

That is what the investor sees.

2. Why VCs Say They "Don't Make Money From Beggars"

Venture capital does not invest in people doing work.

It invests in systems that replace or empower those people.

VCs want:

tech
data
defensibility
network effects
recurring revenue
exponential growth

The traditional agent model offers none.

Here is how a VC evaluates the agent industry:

VC Criterion	Traditional Agent Model	Why They Walk Away
Scalability	1 agent = 1 output	Cannot 100x revenue. Labour-bound.
Defensibility	Based on personality + hustle	Any competitor can enter tomorrow.
Proprietary Asset	Listings? Half fake. Half duplicated.	Nothing to own, nothing to defend.
Exit Potential	Zero	You can't IPO someone's phonebook.
Recurring Revenue	Zero	Depends on one-off commissions.

So when a VC says: "We don't make money from beggars."

What they mean is: "We don't make money from businesses that rely on manual labour inside a broken ecosystem. We only invest in platforms that own the ecosystem."

It is not cruel.

It is economics.

3. The Harsh Social Layer: The Trust Tax

Now add another painful truth — the public stigma that property agents inherit the moment they register as REN:

When a parent says:

"My son is a doctor." → society nods with respect.
"My daughter is a lawyer." → society nods with respect.
"My child is an accountant." → society nods with respect.

But when someone says: "My son is a property agent."

The room shifts.

People assume:

he did poorly in school
he could not succeed in a "real job"
he is aggressive, desperate, or dishonest
he cannot be trusted with money

This automatic suspicion is what we call the Trust Tax — the psychological penalty the public imposes on agents before they even begin their career.

To a VC, this stigma means:

agents are low-trust participants
any business depending on agents inherits low trust
low trust = low valuation
low valuation = no investment

This is why the investor's sentence, while cruel, is structurally accurate.

4. But Here's the Part the VC Doesn't See

The agent is not the problem.

The architecture is the problem.

Agents operate in an industry with:

fake listings
unverified information
inconsistent cooperation
no unified inventory
no protection for effort
no standardized workflow
no transparency
no audit rails
no defensible network effects
no national cooperation infrastructure

In such an ecosystem: every agent is forced into beggar economics.

Not because they lack talent.

Not because they lack integrity.

But because the system converts them into beggars.

The VC insult is not directed at the agent.

It is directed at the architecture that fails the agent.

5. The Counter-Argument: Build the System That Eliminates Beggars

You cannot change the VC's mind by defending agents.

You change it by changing the system.

Here is the transformation:

The "Beggars" Model	The Investable Model
Agents chasing leads	Platform distributing leads algorithmically
Fake, duplicate listings	Verified inventory (single source of truth)
Random co-broking	ACN-style structured cooperation
Manual commission	Automated, role-based governance
Trust deficit	Trust infrastructure (proof-of-work, audit logs)
Labour-bound income	Platform revenue, data revenue, network revenue
No defensibility	High defensibility (roles, data, PDPA/AMLA frameworks)