Singapore Is About to Publish What Property Agents Actually Earn — And the Median Is $29,000

The Straits Times opened its piece with a man who grew up in the business: as a child, Mervyn Ong followed his property agent parents to viewings and helped them stuff flyers into letterboxes.

It then took him nine attempts over fifteen years to pass the Real Estate Salesperson examination. He hired a tutor. He qualified in 2023, at 38.

“I don't like to be deskbound. I have wanted to be a real estate agent since young, but the exams were very hard to pass,” he told the paper. “It took me 15 years, but I don't feel paiseh about it.”

Hold that image, because it is the opposite of the one the industry is usually sold on. Not a quick pivot into easy money — fifteen years of wanting it.

The reporting is unusually specific about what comes out of a commission, and this is where the story turns.

In his first year Ong earned about $80,000 in gross commission. By his third year, 2025, his take-home had risen to just over $200,000. But his agency took a 10 per cent cut, and he spent close to $20,000 on property portal advertising in 2025 alone — on top of videos at $500 to $1,200 each and around $700 a year for market report subscriptions.

Semantha Soon, 28, came in the other way: a business graduate who passed the RES exam on her first attempt and joined ERA in January 2025 after a four-year bond. She earned $104,000 gross in her first year across more than twenty transactions — but commissions on about half of those deals were still unpaid at year end. Her expenses came to roughly $30,000.

“If I spend a certain amount on marketing today, I cannot directly attribute that cost to a particular client,” she told ST. “I have to look at my total marketing expenses for the year and average them out over 12 months.”

And then there is the wait. PropNex chief agency officer Eddie Lim told the paper an agent may take three to six months to close a deal, then another three to six months after completion to be paid — and for some new launches, 12 to 24 months. ERA's Eugene Lim added the part that rarely makes a recruitment poster: no basic salary, no employer CPF, and it is common for even active agents to go months with no income at all.

Against that backdrop, the regulator is about to do something quite blunt.

From 1 January 2027, CEA will start collecting agents' commission data every month, and may publish aggregated industry figures — explicitly, as ST reports, to help prospective agents decide whether or not to join. It arrives alongside a separate renewal rule requiring three transactions in three years or a refresher exam, which we covered when it was announced.

Two things are worth separating here, because they get bundled in the coverage.

The renewal rule is about competence — keeping licensed agents current. The commission data is about information, and it points outward, at the people deciding whether to sign up. CEA is not capping the industry. It is removing the information asymmetry that let the industry grow to 36,816 agents, up almost 30 per cent from 28,397 at the start of 2017.

A regulator that publishes what a job pays is making a bet: that the number itself does the work no rule could.

The Straits Times obtained 2025 figures from ERA and PropNex, which together account for 60 per cent of Singapore's agents. Huttons and OrangeTee & Tie declined.

ERA's own distribution, as reported: half of its active agents earned under $60,000 gross; 16% earned $60,000 to under $100,000; 20% earned $100,000 to under $200,000; and 14% earned $200,000 or more.

Now the trap, which ST flags and which will be quoted out of context for years: ERA's $29,000 is a median and PropNex's $86,500 is an average, and they cannot be compared. An average is dragged upward by the top of a skewed distribution; a median is the person standing in the middle. On ERA's own numbers, the top decile alone earns roughly twelve times the median. That is exactly the shape where averages stop describing anybody.

One more definitional point that matters more than it sounds: “active” here means agents who completed at least three transactions between 2023 and 2025 — the very bar the new renewal rule sets. So $29,000 is not the median agent. It is the median of the agents who passed. Everyone the new rule is designed to filter out sits below this table entirely.

We hold no commission data and we will not estimate any. What we do hold is the deals side: an aggregate distribution of how transactions are spread across CEA-registered salespersons. No individual agent, no earnings — that is a firm rule here, not a limitation we are apologising for.

Across 29,879 agents with at least one recorded deal:

Sum the top three bands and 35.6% of agents who have ever done a deal have done fewer than ten in their whole career. At the other end, 3.4% have done 200 or more, and 72 people have done 500-plus.

This is a completely different dataset, measuring a different thing, over a different window — and it produces the same silhouette as ERA's income table. That convergence is the finding. Whatever CEA publishes in 2027, expect a long thin tail on the right and a large crowd near the floor, because that is what both the money and the deals already look like.

CEA explained the three-deals-in-three-years bar by pointing to its 2024 Public Perception Survey, in which 74 per cent of consumers said they expect an agent to complete at least one transaction a year to stay familiar with current rules. Measuring over three years, CEA said, allows for market fluctuations.

Set that against the other figure in the same report: as at 1 January 2026, of 32,967 agents registered since 2023, about four in ten — 12,920 — had not completed at least three residential transactions between 2023 and 2025. The median agent completed two residential transactions a year.

ERA's Eugene Lim, who is also president of the Singapore Institute of Estate Agents, estimated the total number of agents could fall 10 to 20 per cent after the first three-year cycle ends on 31 December 2029.

Our view: the renewal rule will remove people who were already barely there. The commission data is the measure that changes behaviour, because it works on the intake rather than the outflow. It is very hard to recruit against a published median once one exists — and much of the industry's growth since 2017 was recruited against an unpublished one.

There is a live enforcement question too. PropNex associate group district director Loyalle Chin warned ST the deals rule needs robust checks — an active agent could, for instance, pass a transaction to a registered but inactive spouse to help them clear the bar. CEA's position is that it recognises one agent per side of a deal, and that submitting false or misleading information is an offence.

CEA begins collecting commission data monthly from 1 January 2027. Publication is a separate and softer commitment: the reporting says CEA may publish aggregated industry figures, to give prospective agents a more complete picture.

No publication date, format or level of detail has been announced. “Aggregated” is doing real work in that sentence — it implies industry-level statistics rather than agency-by-agency or individual disclosure.

So the practical answer for anyone weighing up the career: the first official numbers cannot exist before 2027 data has been collected, and the ERA and PropNex figures reported by The Straits Times are the best available proxy until then.

The commission rules are aimed at the industry, not at you. Nothing about your agent's fee, your agreement or your transaction changes on 1 January 2027.

Two second-order effects are worth watching. First, if the number of agents does fall 10 to 20 per cent as ERA's Eugene Lim expects, the agents remaining are on average more active — CEA's stated case is that keeping agents current reduces the risk of losses from misleading advice or procedural lapses.

Second, and much larger, is a longer-term proposal buried in the same report: authorities are considering making HDB's Resale Flat Listing service the default platform for HDB resale advertisements, and studying whether property owners should be allowed to advertise directly on commercial portals. That would let more homeowners transact without an agent at all.

ST is right to flag the other side of it: big-ticket property transactions are complex, and consumers doing them without professional help would need real guidance and safeguards. These proposals are still being studied and CEA says it will keep consulting the industry.

The news — the 2027 rules, CEA's statements, the agent counts, the survey findings and every commission figure come from The Straits Times (13 and 16 August 2026), linked below. The ERA and PropNex data was supplied by those agencies to ST; we have not independently verified it, and note that two of the four largest agencies declined to take part.

The data — the deals distribution is PropKaki's own aggregate cut of agent transaction records for CEA-registered salespersons, as at 20 August 2026, covering 29,879 agents with at least one recorded deal. It is produced through the same aggregate function our app uses, and it is an all-time snapshot that shifts as new deals lodge.

What we will not do — we hold an agent directory, and we do not publish, estimate or infer any individual agent's earnings. The distribution above is deliberately aggregate and deliberately about deals rather than dollars.

The news:

• The Straits Times — New rules for property agents likely to weed out inactive ones, help consumers make better decisions, 13 August 2026.
• The Straits Times — ‘They don't simply open doors and earn five figures’: How much do property agents really earn?, 16 August 2026.

The data:

• PropKaki's aggregate distribution of deals across CEA-registered salespersons, as at 20 August 2026 (no individual agent, no earnings).

This is commentary by the PropKaki Editorial Desk on reporting by The Straits Times. The rules, the agency data and the agents' own accounts belong to that newsroom; the analysis, the framing and the opinions are ours.

It is opinion and general information, not career, financial or property advice. Anyone weighing up estate agency as a profession should read the figures above as gross commission before substantial costs, treat medians and averages as different things, and note that the rules described do not take effect until 1 January 2027 and may be refined before then. CEA has said it will continue consulting the industry.

Published 20 August 2026.