Three Deals in Three Years: Singapore Just Put a Floor Under Its Property Agents

You meet them at the second viewing. They are pleasant, they are prompt, they have the name card and the registration number and everything else that says this is a professional.

And then you ask a real question. What did the unit two floors down go for? How long is the option period, and what happens if the buyer's loan falls through? Is the seller's asking price defensible against what has actually transacted in this block this year?

The answers come back a beat too slow. Not wrong, exactly — just general. Textbook rather than current. At some point you realise the person guiding you through the largest financial decision of your life has not personally done this in quite a while, and is working partly from memory.

They are not a bad person. Often they are doing this alongside another job, or they came back to it after years away, and they genuinely mean to help. But you are not paying for good intentions. You are paying for someone who did this last month, and the month before.

The Council for Estate Agencies asked people what they expected, and the answer was modest. In CEA's 2024 Public Perception Survey, three in four consumers said they expected their property agent to complete at least one property transaction a year.

One a year. Not a top producer, not a market specialist — just someone who has been through the process at least once in the last twelve months.

About 40% of agents do not meet that expectation today.

That figure is the entire justification for what was announced, and it is worth sitting with. It means the gap is not a handful of stragglers at the edge of the register. It is a substantial minority of a licensed profession, holding a credential that consumers reasonably read as a signal of active practice, while not actively practising.

The new requirement is deliberately low: at least three transactions over three years to renew a registration. An average of one a year — precisely the bar consumers said they assumed was already being met.

It arrives alongside a structural change. Property agency licences and agent registrations move from one-year to three-year validity. The two go together: if you are only checking someone every three years, you want the check to mean something.

Crucially, it is not a guillotine. An agent who misses three transactions can instead pass a refresher examination and renew that way. Only someone who does neither, and later wants to return, must retake and pass the real estate salesperson examination from scratch.

The counting is broader than it first appears — residential, commercial, industrial, foreign property and en bloc transactions all count, which matters for agents whose deals are large and infrequent by nature. And it sits on top of the existing 16 training hours a year.

Sun Xueling also flagged longer-term measures under study, the most significant being consumer ratings for individual agents. That is not policy yet. Agencies, while welcoming the transaction rule, asked for safeguards on it — and given how review systems behave when the reviewed party's livelihood depends on them, that caution is not unreasonable.

The reported figures describe the average agent. Our own records let us look at the shape of the distribution instead — and the shape is the story.

PropKaki tracks aggregate activity across 29,686 agents who have at least one recorded deal. Here is how those deals are spread:

This is not a bell curve with a thin tail. It is two industries sharing one register. At one end, 8.7% of agents have exactly one recorded deal and 22.8% have fewer than five in their entire record — that is the first two bands of the table combined. At the other, roughly half have twenty or more, and a small group — 68 agents, 0.2% — have passed five hundred.

One important honesty note about that table, and it cuts against the comfortable reading: it counts only agents with at least one recorded deal. Agents with none are excluded entirely. So the genuinely inactive share of the register is larger than this table shows, not smaller.

This is an all-time view of deals on our records, not a per-year count, so it is not a direct measure of the new three-in-three rule — a career total of four deals could be four deals last year. It is a picture of concentration, not of compliance. No individual agent is identified, and no earnings are shown.

It would be reasonable to expect agencies to resist a measure that thins their salesforce. They did the opposite, and the economics explain why.

Look again at the distribution. The agents in the bottom bands generate very little transaction volume between them. What they do generate is exposure — every disappointing viewing, every out-of-date answer, every complaint attaches to an agency brand and to the profession's reputation. From an agency's point of view, that tail is close to pure cost.

The industry voices in CNA's report made the case in professional terms. Lee Sze Teck of Huttons framed it as keeping agents current: a salesperson up to date with the market gives better advice. PropNex's Eddie Lim called the benchmark "reasonable and measured", noting the median agent completed two residential transactions a year from 2023 to 2025 — twice the new bar. Avril Lee of OrangeTee and Tie by Realion Group described three deals in three years as "a basic level of practical exposure", while making the fair point that professionalism is more than ticking regulatory boxes.

She is right, and it is worth being clear-eyed about what follows: transaction count measures activity, not competence. A rule like this removes the dormant, not the bad. Those are different problems, and only one of them has just been addressed.

For most working agents, nothing changes. The bar is three transactions across a three-year registration period — an average of one a year — and industry figures put the median agent at around two residential transactions annually, roughly double the requirement.

An agent who falls short has a second route: pass a refresher examination and renew on that basis. So losing the registration requires missing the transaction bar and not taking, or not passing, the alternative.

The consequence for someone who lets it lapse and later wants to come back is more serious: they must retake and pass the real estate salesperson examination, the full entry exam, rather than simply re-registering.

It is also worth knowing that the transaction count is not residential-only. Residential, commercial, industrial, foreign property and en bloc transactions all count towards it — which matters for agents working in slower, larger-ticket segments.

You do not have to wait three years for a regulator to answer this for you, and the new rule will not answer it either — a renewed registration only tells you someone cleared a low bar or passed a paper.

Ask directly, and ask specifically. Not "are you experienced?" but: which transactions have you personally closed in the last twelve months, in this area or this segment? An active agent answers that immediately and in detail, because they lived it. Ask what comparable units in the same project or block have actually transacted at recently, and see whether the answer is a number with a date attached or a general impression.

Check the CEA Public Register for registration status and the agency they are attached to — that confirms they are licensed, which is necessary but not sufficient.

And weigh their answers against transacted data rather than asking prices, because asking prices are what everyone hopes for and transacted prices are what people paid. If an agent's view of value cannot be reconciled with what has actually changed hands, that gap matters more than any credential.

The announcement and every figure attached to it — the three-in-three requirement, the move to three-year licence validity, the refresher-examination alternative, the re-entry examination, the transaction types that count, the 16 annual training hours, CEA's 2024 Public Perception Survey findings, the 2023-2025 median of two residential transactions per agent per year, and the industry comments from Huttons, PropNex and OrangeTee and Tie — comes from CNA's report of Senior Minister of State Sun Xueling's 28 July 2026 announcement, linked below. Those are the reporters' facts, attributed rather than claimed.

The activity distribution is ours: an aggregate histogram of deals across agents, drawn from PropKaki's agent activity records via the same function our app uses, as at 29 July 2026.

Its caveats matter more than usual. It is aggregate only — no individual agent is identified and no earnings are shown, a standing rule for us. It counts deals as transactions, not dollar value. It is an all-time view, not a per-year one, so it cannot be read as a measure of who would pass or fail the new rule. It excludes agents with zero recorded deals, so the inactive share of the register is larger than the table implies. And it is a snapshot that shifts as new deals lodge.

The news:

• CNA — Property agencies welcome new minimum transaction rule, seek safeguards for consumer ratings, 29 July 2026, reporting Senior Minister of State for National Development Sun Xueling's announcement and comments from Lee Sze Teck (Huttons), Eddie Lim (PropNex) and Avril Lee (OrangeTee and Tie by Realion Group).

The data:

• PropKaki aggregate agent activity distribution — 29,686 agents with at least one recorded deal, as at 29 July 2026. Aggregate bands only; no individual agent, no earnings.

This is commentary by the PropKaki Editorial Desk on reporting by CNA. The account of what was announced, and the industry reaction, belong to that newsroom; the distribution analysis, the framing and the opinions are ours.

Nothing here is a judgement about any individual property agent, and nothing here identifies one. Our activity data is published in aggregate bands only, and we do not publish agent earnings. A low deal count is not evidence of poor service, and a high one is not a recommendation.

This is opinion and general information, not financial, legal or career advice. Agents making decisions about their registration should work from CEA's own published requirements rather than a commentary reading of a news report, and details can be refined after an announcement.

Published 29 July 2026.