Opening the office doors in 2016 alongside her husband, an award-winning sales agent, Owen Chen, Place Sunnybank has seven lead agents and settled almost $8 million in fees this year.

But for Ping, success is not about the dollar value; what she is most proud of is the team her and Owen have created together.

The Real Estate Conversation asked Ping what the award meant to you as a leader and to your team?

The Award means a lot for us.

It means our efforts, passion and hard work were seen and recognised by the industry peak body REIQ who represent the best practice and highest standard of the industry. It means our belief, value and vision stands out and we must have done something right in the journey.  

We had our business for 6 years now and started the business from scratch and we learnt a lot during the journey. However, our belief in pushing ourselves to be the best possible version and keeping our standard high never dropped.

We worked so hard to train and build a high performing sales and property management team as well as promoting mental health, supports, best practice training and team culture. I strongly believe a happy team deliver the best possible results for the clients. We truly care everyone in the team.

Culture is not just a saying; it is something that intangible but needs to have considerable efforts in building it and directing it to the right way. I think we made it. 

Whats next for your team in 2023? 

I am actually very excited now as next year we have a few sales associate graduated from our internal training program and would be ready to go to become 1st year lead agent. We had such a great relationship within the team and I cannot wait to see them growing and excelling.

We had a track record of training brand new people into high performing agent. We have the right structure and formula to do it.

With our property management team, our recent restructure enabled the team to team work more, efficiently and effectively, a clear grow path and lots of support and training available for my PM especially new PMs to excel.

The team is doubling in size next year and we spent so much focus on quality (quality people, quality process etc) over quantity.

Growth is not about GCI to us, it is about everyone finding their balance, ticking their personal goals and professional goals, along with a bunch of mind-like people working together. Each of us truly enjoy coming to work every day, the energy is very high.

Next year we will have bigger focus on community and give back to community is always what we wanted to do and what we are passionate about.

More about Ping and Place Sunnybank.

Ping believes everyone has opportunity to succeed in real estate; their team uses Owen Chen’s pathway to success as their formula. Ping rebuilt the internal process over a year ago.

“We have a very efficient support team and our two-million-dollar writers do not need to have an admin person or marketing person in their team,” she said.

The busy mum of two children has a few academic degrees, including Bachelor of Engineering and a Master’s degree in Applied Finance and CPA.

Ping’s strength to the business has always been problem solving and process improvement and training. Ping regularly provides direct training to the sales, agent support and property management teams.

Ping’s star performer, Jason Song, is now a partner in the business, starting at Place Sunnybank four years ago; he settled around 20 homes in his first year with Place.

Last year, Jason wrote a massive $2.4M in fees and handled over 100 deals within his own business. Jason’s team achieved Place group #2 sales ranking in 2022’s annual awards.

“My desk is next to Jason and for a period, I think he was busy, but not productive. He needed to build the fundamentals of growth, not just focus on cashflow. We tweaked his strategy a little and that was the sliding door moment for Jason.” Ping said.

“Jason’s success is no doubt 100% his hard work and persistency, but we all sometimes need that sliding door moment – I think that’s the true collaboration Andy Guo’s had a few jobs before he joined Ping three years ago.

Since starting real estate in property management under Ping’s training and leadership, Andy has gone from strength to strength. Ping identified Andy’s talent and asked him if he wanted to move into sales.

“His life has changed and it’s so incredibly heart-warming to watch his success,” Ping said.

He is now a high-performing lead agent and wrote $650K in sales in his first year in sales. The most exciting part was that they could tick his goal of sending their daughter to the school they wanted her to attend.

Place Sunnybank’s property management team has also doubled within 12 months through organic growth

“Growth for us isn’t about just GCI. I want my team ticking their personal goals and professional goals, unstressed but productive and having their own growth path within our business. We all have challenges, but I take ownership of that and build solution around my team.”

While the team already has a prominent focus in local initiatives, Ping said the team’s 2023 goal is to find ways to give back further to the community and continue the phenomenal growth within their team.