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A top agent opens up about the hardest time in their career and how agents can overcome adversity.
Vivien Yap, principal of LJ Hooker Claremont, knows the power of positive thinking. She spoke at AREC 2016 about the hardest time in her real estate career and the support that got her through it.
“In that first month I thought, ‘Am I going to make it, am I going to make it?’ because I was on such a high for such a long time and that moment I opened my office, a lot of people wanted it to fail,” Ms Yap said.
“When you’re about to make that change in life, you’re so scared and so worried and so nervous and that’s when you start to lose belief in yourself.”
This loss of confidence “affects everything, it affects you in how you list, in how you actually speak to your staff, in how you speak to people at home”, she said.
Ms Yap said she hit several hurdles in the first few months of her new office opening.
“The council said to us, ‘You cannot operate out of that premise because it’s a restaurant’, so we had to fight constantly so we went back to the council twice and got rejected. We went to the tribunal to fight for the site again and they said, ‘You’re not going to get it’.
“It wasn’t easy, I was using my car as my office, I was using my clients’ lounge rooms as the office as well, and of course I did have head office that I could use as an office too, but it was just not the same because I lost my routine,” she said.
Ms Yap said it was the support of those around her that bolstered her confidence and encouraged her to fight for what she knew she wanted.
“It was four-five months of pain and you think, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ but from the moment I moved in, I only had four months to get my act together and in that four months we’ve just written $2 million,” Ms Yap said.
“Anything is possible. You could be down in the dumpsters, it doesn’t matter, you just need to look around you and just keep on all the positive things around you to get you back up.”
