How to Never Be Held Hostage by Property Portals Again?

"Yasser, will there be more competition if more agents get your system too?" I've heard this one before. You may be wondering the same thing too. After all, just like in Property Guru's case, the first agents to sign up reaped a ton of benefits. That was before their platform got saturated with agents. You're right to suspect all platforms are the same; that they go cheap to to attract as many agents as possible. Once they have enough users, they raise their prices and suck the agents dry. It's true. Property Guru did that. 99.co may do the same too. (In fact, it might already be doing this.) You just never know with these property portals. You're right to be angry at them. Advertisers like them exist to suck agents dry! And it creates an unfair playing ground where those agents willing or able to spend money on their platform win at the expense of all the rest. I too felt the exact same way too. But back in 2008, I was overly reliant on google to send me traffic. I was trying to support my mother, because I was the eldest of my siblings and we were going through tough times in those days. And then suddenly came the infamous 'Google Slap', and then my advertising account got banned for life. Just like that, a good source of business went down almost overnight. It sent chills down my spine when I discovered that. I just panicked. How was I to get new business? The bigger trouble was, I didn't know many people. And I had fewer contacts on my Nokia phone. I wasn't an outgoing person; In fact, I was always shy. It was hard for me to socialise or say the right words at the right time to anyone. I had it harder than most agents because, not only I grew up overseas for most of my childhood, but I only returned to Singapore in the year 2000. And I completed National Service in 2005. That was barely three years for me to get to know some people! Don't you agree that's not enough time, even for an introvert, right? So imagine, here I was as a realtor, overly dependent on just one platform for all of my business. 100% at their mercy. And all those years ago, I discovered something that you may also be realising right now. That these platforms show no mercy! That they only care about money! That to them, we're just nameless numbers! And they're arrogant. And they always get away scott-free after raising their fees! 😡 So you can imagine that I had no other choice but to escape from this problem. I never wanted to be in the same desperate position again! I never wanted to be at their mercy again! I decided to build my own platform for myself. But it wasn't easy though. I reinvested back every penny I had on me into this. And my team of ten developers took 9 long months to do it. So on the tenth month, I pushed a button and my system was live. But here's what happened next. I had failed to understand one simple fact: that Google and PropertyGuru were TRAFFIC that I could control, I just didn't own it! The platform I built was TRAFFIC I OWNED! It was radically different! I could know send my properties and new launches any time I wanted. Why? Because I owned it! But traffic started somewhere, right? People discovered me on Google or Property Guru right? And that was how I was able to never again be held hostage by any platform! I could still survive even if Facebook went down! I could still sell houses even if Property Guru went down! Now, that is POWER, right?