View Your First Property as a Foothold

Ismail Gafoor found out what it means to fail when he was a young student. He was born in 1963, and by the time he was finishing secondary school, his cohort had been hit by a policy change: They had to pass the second-language O-level exams to qualify for junior college and pre-university.

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For young Ismail, that language was Tamil. The minimum passing grade was D7.

When he sat the exam at Tiong Bahru Secondary School in 1979, he received an E8 for Tamil. Crushed, he chose to repeat Secondary 4 the next year, battling the shame of staying back.

He did even worse: an F9.

Despite passing five other subjects, including biology and geography with distinction, that one red mark sealed his fate. Junior college was out. So was university and a straightforward academic path.

"Right before my eyes, I saw all of that go up in flames. I felt like an absolute failure."

This life-defining episode opens his autobiography, I Am Not Good Enough, which will be available in bookshops on July 16.

Over lunch at Culina Bistro in Dempsey, the co-founder, executive chairman and chief executive of real estate firm PropNex recalls how his "whole world crashed" with that F9 grade.

I empathise fully. Like him, I had struggled with my second language, Chinese. To be 16 and know your fate is being decided by a subject you are bad at - and not for want of trying and tuition - is a brutal experience.

Though he spoke Tamil at home, Mr Gafoor says he struggled to write it. "I really can't," he says. "There are over 200 letters and I couldn't differentiate between them."

That we're chatting now must mean his story had a happy ending. It does, but the 61-year-old had to battle many more odds along the way.

Today, PropNex, which is listed on the Singapore Exchange, is the country's largest real estate agency, with about 13,600 agents. It started in 2000 as a merger of several property agencies including Nooris Consultants, which Mr Gafoor and his wife Nooraini Noordin had founded in 1996.

PropNex celebrates its 25th anniversary on July 15.