Hi,
I’m wondering if there would be opportunities for a side career in real estate during weekends? I recently took the exam for local real estate salesperson and passed.
Background: Taiwanese but lived abroad entire life, English speaker, Intermediate Mandarin, full-time job in tech, real estate broker license in another country.
Do you have any connections in Taiwan, like guanxi and stuff? Kinda important if you want to actually sell houses.
Remember you don’t get paid to be a real estate agent, you pay to be one. You only get paid commission if you sell a house.
If you lived abroad your entire life, you’re at a severe disadvantage.
As a side hustle in addition to your part time job, why not?
Easy to start small with rentals if you are bilingual, people are regularly looking for places here and on Facebook.
I reached out to a couple of agents early in my search, one thing I wanted was just someone to help with translation and negotiation.
Not everything is on 591, you could start by going around looking for sale and rent signs where you live, contact them, and offer to represent them on 591. A lot of independent sellers on 591 have terrible photos, so you could look for independent listings there and offer to help them out.
Would take a while to build up to high end sales, where the real money is, but one can’t expect to have an easy sucessful business overnight.
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Since you’re bilingual maybe you can target foreigners? It should be a growing market and could be lucrative. You could provide services like having an English copy of all the real estate and rental contracts, having connections to mortgage bankers that can provide mortgages with an English contract, and being the middle man between locals and foreigners.
I think you may need to work with the client’s schedule though, so not sure how realistic it is to do part time and tell clients you can only meet nights and weekends to sign papers or do another walkthrough of a property.
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Depending on your employment contract, you might need to get approval from your employer. Other than that, why not?
Since I got married in Taiwan, my spouse and I bought 3 places, sold one, rent one out, and rented ourselves an apartment in Taipei. How I would have loved to have a realtor comfortable in English! Instead, I relied on my spouse or friends who were co-investing, which were undoubted blessings to have, but I still felt quite limited.
I have never been a realtor, but I imagine for you to make a go of this, even part-time, you would need to make sure you had a few things in place.
1. Database of properties (dealflow).
It would be awesome if you could do this by managing your own portfolio via 591. I wonder if this is possible, though. Two of the 3 places I bought in Taipei were places my family was going to live. We tried all the usual methods - friends and family, websites like 591 and Forumosa for owner listed places, walking around preferred neighborhoods looking at windows or asking building security for leads - before ultimately talking to neighborhood realtors and agents referred by friends. Naturally, the realtors had the most leads that resulted in actual apartment viewings. These are the big name agencies like Xinyi, Yungshin, and Century21.
When we rented an apartment, that process moved very quickly. We knew exactly what we needed and the neighborhood we targeted. We found our place in one week - it was exciting and worked out really well. We had an awesome landlady. I recall we spoke to 3 realtors in the area, and one was particularly productive in showing a lot of places. When we bought - and we bought before and during Covid - the pace was very slow. Fortunately, we could afford to take our time. We saw many places in many different neighborhoods – during Covid, it felt like we took 6 months (for obvious reasons) – and switched or added on other realtors as we widened our searches. And when we sold, we went through at least 2 agents over a long period of time - we were not in a rush to sell, and we ended up selling below market so we could close on a purchase we wanted to make in a different part of the Taipei.
So, if you have a particular niche (geography, client profile) or speciality (xiaoqu like Lotus Hill Insiders at Lotus Hill ) then you could build up an expertise on the weekends and freelance.
2. Legal support (backoffice).
If you attach yourself to a real estate agency, then you will have colleagues to help close deals, like land scribes. During the final negotiation stage, I remember sitting with my spouse in a room waiting for the seller (who sat in a different room) decide whether to accept our offer. People would shuttle back and forth between our rooms before we reached an agreement and then we would all get together to put our chops on the documents. The land scribes, land registration people, or accountants - I don’t recall the Chinese for this - would coordinate this process. When I sold an investment property in a xiaoqu in Ankeng, the process was the same. That was a bit more complicated because the buyer didn’t make a final decision the first time we met up.
So, if you are freelancing as a realtor, I imagine you will need to have access to trusted resource like land scribes and notaries, in addition to any legal or accounting support any small business should have.
3. Licensing.
I do not know what kind of licensing you need. In working with the major realtors, I actually never asked. I assumed they were licensed or qualified and besides my partner probably vetted them. If the realtors taking me around were comfortable speaking in English, I would have asked a whole lot more about their qualifications, their dealflow, and the neighborhoods I visited with them. All of this would have made me a lot more comfortable about the entire process, although obviously, I didn’t need to be that comfortable to get things done.
I hope these thoughts help. Would love to hear more about what you are doing if you do get your real estate agency up and running.
Other than Facebook and some very small sites with a few listings, it doesn’t seem like there is a website for real estate and rentals in Taiwan in English?
591 can be translated with Google Translate. It isn’t ideal, but it can be sorted. For some people it would be worth it to pay a fee to someone with English
Are you looking for a place in Taiwan, @citizen86? Because I can point you to someone who might help 
The rental and sales market to foreigners is not ‘growing’ from what I can see in many places I have lived. Most foreigners in Taiwan have little in terms of money behind them and will be pennypinching (I’m not criticizing that, been there myself). Other immigrants such as HKers and Taiwanese Americans already have Chinese or local relatives and friends.
But there is definitely an underserved niche there for those richer folks on gold cards (is that you Jimbob but then again you speak and read Chinese right?) and the odd families and business people.
There’s one agency that is doing subletting to students AFAIK.
What city are you located in?
You see if Taiwan’s real estate was cheaper I would be eager to work with you on AirBnBs in the South but even in Kaohsiung it’s getting a bit pricey. Tainan is already stupid money in many places. Pain in the hole pardon my French.
Haha, yes, it was a question with multiple reasons. We’ll probably be looking in June for a place. I’m also curious if there might be a market for a website for real estate and rentals in languages other than Chinese (with a big emphasis on English)
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This. You could be a broker or intermediate and make the process relatively painless for somebody not fluent in Chinese. I think plenty of foreigners would pay for that.