Wiped out once, he now drives a Maserati

A MAN'S TALE OF BRICKS-AND-MORTAR SUCCESS

Wiped out once, he now drives a Maserati

THIS is an against-the-odds tale to perk up your personal meter to measure happiness.

By Elysa Chen


18 August 2008

THIS is an against-the-odds tale to perk up your personal meter to measure happiness.

Be happy for Mr David Cheang, youngest senior vice-president in the HSR Property Group.

He was once down but, perhaps like you, he never gives up.

Mr Cheang was just 21 years old when his family was hit by the Asian financial crisis, in 1997.

They lost their semi-detached house and had to move to an HDB flat in the nearby Pasir Ris estate.

His father, who was running an electronics business then, also suffered strokes four times during that tumultuous period.

Yet, after eight years of real estate work, Mr Cheang has got it all back.

He moved into a new semi-detached house a week ago. It has exactly the same layout as his father's old house.

Parents lost everything

He said: 'My parents lost everything overnight. But I have got back what they lost.'

Last week, he not only moved into his $2.8m house, he also bought a new Maserati Quatroporte, worth a cool $400,000.

He said: 'When I drove my car into my house, it was the exact same feeling I had when I was driving my father's Mercedes Benz into our old house. That feeling is indescribable.'

Besides the extravagance of his house and his car, there is something else that the two have in common: the number five.

Mr Cheang placed a special bid for a car plate with the number five on it, and his house number also contains that digit.

This is because of a promise he made his mother-in-law two years ago.

He said: 'I told her, 'Give me two years, and I will wu bo (have wife) wu chia (have car), wu lui (have money), wu chu (have house), wu kia (have child).' And it really came true. This house by the beach and family is a dream come true for me.'

Wu, in Hokkien, means 'to have', but has the same pronunciation as 'five' in Mandarin.

His message for others with similar aspirations is to never lose heart.

He recalls his own tough times during the first three years of his career when he was clocking 18-hour days at work just cold-calling potential clients and even distributing his namecards to strangers in the lift.

Money comes, money goes

More than once, he even had to play marriage counsellor to his clients when they got divorced, and approached him to help them sell their houses.

Although he was closing deals, in the first 3 1/2 years of working, most of his pay went to paying off the 'millions of dollars' that his parents owed the bank and their creditors.

Mr Cheang said: 'I would be earning money, but I never saw the money! It seemed as though the bills and debts to pay were never-ending.

'I would try to save for a rainy day, but the rainy days kept coming, and I always needed a big umbrella again. It was always a big heartache whenever I had to take out money from the bank.'

In 2000, he got his first big break when he got the exclusive opportunity to sell a house that his fellow agents said was 'impossible to sell' because of the direction it was facing.

But within two months, he sold the house, and managed to earn a commission of $13,250.

In his first year as a full-time associate agent, he was already winning awards for being the top producer, closing as many as six deals a day during the seventh month period.

Today, Mr Cheang still works 15 hours a day.

But he never forgets the days when he was down. That's why a portion of his income goes to the charities now.

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