PropertyGuru reality show winner William Tan became an agent at 45, takes leaps of faith - The Straits Times

William Tan is the winner of PropertyGuru’s reality show Home Run Season 3, where 12 ambitious property agents competed to be the best.

SINGAPORE - William Tan can stage any property appealingly for sale, but the star realtor does not know how to stage his emotions.

A muscled Hyrox competitor, the 51-year-old Singaporean exudes poise under pressure. That composure recently helped him win the third season of PropertyGuru’s local reality show Home Run, where 12 ambitious property agents competed to ace challenges, from video marketing to pitching a good class bungalow. 

Yet, Tan was momentarily misty-eyed on national television in Episode 5, and again in an interview with The Straits Times, while remembering a 94-year-old client whose family felt she should transition to a nursing home.

Mentally sharp though frail, the senior lived with a domestic helper and rejected every previous agent’s pitch to sell her Marine Parade Housing Board flat. She had spent half a century there, surrounded by memories and photographs dating back to the 1930s.

“I decided that, no, I’m not going to pitch anything,” he recalls. “I just wanted to have a chat.”

Slowly, she opened up, allowing him to prepare the property for the market. Tan helped her declutter, all the while honouring her deep attachment to her “forever home”. Two months later, the flat was sold to a very happy family. 

His epiphany arrived during the completion process at HDB. Sitting in her wheelchair, the Eurasian auntie, who rarely spoke, reached out her hand and thanked him. 

“I’ll remember this for the rest of my career,” says Tan of that encounter 4½ years ago. “It was beyond just working on a transaction. You have an impact on somebody’s life.” 

That day, Tan realised afresh that real estate is less about moving brick and mortar than stewarding real people through life transitions.

Today, he leads a 15-man team at home-grown agency SRI. He navigates residential segments, dealing in resale HDB flats, condominium units, new launches and landed homes. He also brokers commercial real estate. 

He approaches these spaces not through sales talk, but with the eye of a seasoned marketeer – a skill forged long before his mid-life career pivot.

“I don’t think I’m a great salesperson,” he reveals. “I’m a marketeer in training. The way I try to sell a property is through understanding people and what their needs are. It’s just like taking a brief.”

This audience-first ethos was built over 20 years in marketing, branding and communications. 

His corporate pedigree includes leadership stints as senior marketing manager/team head at SPH Magazines and marketing head at Esquire Singapore. He later advanced to oversee digital platforms and operations as head of digital marketing for international media house Burda, managing high-end luxury portfolios like Prestige and Augustman.

But as the media landscape began to contract, scaling the corporate ladder lost its lustre. At the same time, he was investing in property and enjoying home decorating.

At 45, he took a leap of faith, plunging into the real estate arena as a newbie agent. To project professionalism, Tan leaned into a hyper-focused, meticulous, serious corporate role.

In 2026, he took an equally daunting leap of faith: stepping in front of reality television cameras for Home Run 3. The five-episode weekly contest culminated in the Nov 5 finale, streaming across mewatch and the YouTube channels of Mediacorp and PropertyGuru. 

Urged on by his close friend and colleague Kesang Labattu – the runner-up of the show’s second season in 2025 – Tan entered the competition to test his property acumen.

PropertyGuru's Home Run 3 is a five-episode show where agents compete to ace challenges like selling a good class bungalow.

But his corporate armour followed him onto the set, where the feedback from Episode 1 was that he seemed too cold.

Off-camera, friends know him as a fun, expressive person. Tan figured he could “unlearn” the penchant for perfection and instead lower his guard, chill and be himself.

“In this age of social media, sometimes you have to allow a little bit of the human side of yourself to come through. You cannot be too perfect,” reckons Tan, who is active on socials and visibly more spontaneous now.

Ditching perfection, he has discovered that vulnerability is not a weakness, but possibly a competitive asset.

This breakthrough paid off in Episode 2 during the home-staging challenge – the art of dressing a property for sale. This is also Tan’s professional forte and personal passion. 

Two years ago, he channelled his love of home decor into launching DreamHaus, his home-staging sub-brand. Operating from a Lower Delta warehouse stocked with curated furniture, DreamHaus fills a market gap. 

“When I’m staging, it’s just me and the furniture and some art and flowers.” He loves spending therapeutic afternoons alone inside a property, crafting spatial narratives.

Episode 2 also brought him face to face with guest judge Cliff Tan, the Britain-based Singaporean architect and influencer known for his bubbly personality and millions of social media followers. 

As a master of space optimisation and energy flow, the guest judge entrenched the contestant’s belief that a property must tell a compelling visual story to resonate with prospective buyers.

This ideal bore fruit recently when Tan took over a condominium unit listing that had languished on the market unsold for 10 years. Mindful that the property’s unique layout might be confusing to buyers, and that the tenanted unit was not in the best condition, he deployed DreamHaus to rework its visual narrative.

He dressed a wraparound balcony with lush greenery and outdoor furniture. It still took another year to sell, but interest had revived. It finally changed hands in October.

“Staging can help to bring the crowd in, and help buyers envision the place,” he says. “But obviously there are also other factors.” The District 9 condo, for example, was about to contend with construction noise.

The validation of his spatial mastery came during that same Episode 2 home-staging challenge. Armed with deep expertise, Tan could have easily dominated his teammates on the show. Instead, he intentionally stepped back, holding space for others to voice their design opinions. 

“Leadership isn’t always about being the loudest in the room,” Tan reflects. “Sometimes, it’s knowing when to lead, and when to let others shine.”

The judges recognised his gracious leadership, and the team members surprised themselves by completing their layout ahead of the gruelling 45-minute deadline. 

William Tan from SRI says leadership is knowing when to lead, and when to let others shine.

This inclusiveness can dismantle barriers within the highly competitive industry. In the final showdown, Tan faced runner-up Claire Tang, a determined, energetic 28-year-old from rival agency Huttons Asia.

“We are quite similar and different at the same time,” he says.

“But she is young enough to be my daughter, if I had one,” adds Tan, who lives with his partner of 20 years and two cats in their beloved Tiong Bahru HDB flat. The couple also buy private properties to grow their investments.

Rather than fostering division, Home Run 3 removed the walls that separate local agencies. The intense shared experience created genuine bonds among the contestants, whose inter-agency group chat still buzzes post-filming.

For Tan, whose prize is a PropertyGuru Platinum account worth $30,000, it fortifies a baseline belief in the power of partnership.

This spirit of collaboration takes new shape on Nov 6 with the debut of HausPour, a new lifestyle video podcast streaming on YouTube.

Co-hosted by Tan and Labattu, the show presents light-hearted, behind-the-scenes conversations, with the first episode tracing their friendship and post-show celebrations.

“It’s not a sales-y kind of a podcast,” he explains. But there will be a property angle here and there, with future guests talking about their home journeys.

His own multifaceted journey has also earned him peer recognition – his other trophy is PropertyGuru’s coveted Agent’s Choice Award, presented on Nov 3. Because it is voted on by fellow agents using their official registration IDs, it is proof that he is respected across competitive lines. 

Even as he celebrates his double accolades, he refuses to settle. 

“Home Run is not going to be the peak of my career,” he insists. “I don’t want it to end here. It has to lead to something – another chapter of my life.”

He concludes: “I’m still learning. I’m still surprising myself that, oh, I can make a difference. I can still do a lot of things.”

Home Run 3 is available on mewatch and the YouTube channels of Mediacorp and PropertyGuru.

Lee Siew Hua covers design and lifestyle, and contributes Sunday opinion columns.