A Real Flashy Doctor

From a medical doctor to real estate, it’ll be a flash before Dr. Lee Ville, Director of New Bob Group of Companies sets another buzz in the market.

A medical practitioner, how did you get involved in the real estate industry?

I’ve always been exposed to real estate growing up as my family has been involved in this industry ever since I was born. Upon completing my housemanship in Penang Hospital, I was at a crossroad deciding what would be next. At that time, I saw a great opportunity in the real estate industry and decided to venture into my family business. Moreover, I’ve also wanted to have a change in my career. I believe it was the perfect time because at that point of time in time my father also wanted to scale back on his workload. Hence, I gave myself a year to be accustomed to the industry before deciding that it was meant for me and here.

What’s your most challenging moment and what have you learnt from it?

Dealing with public sentiments, especially from local settlers around the project. We were going to announce to build light industrial factories back then and there were protests from the neighbouring land owners. In fact, our project does not affect them in any way since they don’t own the site. The objection was solely spawned because of our intention to develop next to them. As a consequence of the objection, the project was on hold for virtually over a year and a half before we could continue.

I believe there were a lot of things we could have done before initiating the project. All these issues could have been avoided if we had consulted the locals earlier with a simple briefing on the project.

As a Director, what are your principles in leading your company?

I believe innovation is immensely important. It’s also important to involve everyone when it comes to decision making, where I would normally get everyone’s feedbacks and ideas. It’s obviously easy to tell the managers what to do and get the task or project completed; it’s a completely different scenario altogether if you ask them for ideas and opinions where we could incorporate them into an execution plan. With that, everyone could grow together, be part of the process and feel their personal contribution and involvement in spearheading the company growth formulated by all involved.

It’s also important for me to do what is important now rather than what’s urgent as there isn’t enough time in a day for me. Holding a key management role in the office, everything always seems urgent and needs to be resolved immediately. The only way to get more time is to empower the leaders to resolve issues themselves. This way, I could spend more time planning our company’s direction.

You’re involved in REHDA Youth Penang and ERA Malaysia, tell us more

Being a committee member of REHDA Penang, at times we attend the REHDA National Council meeting and it was there that I met the founders of REHDA Youth, Sam Tan and Chan Kin Meng. The existence of REHDA Youth is basically to build the next generation of developers and assist each other as well as grow together. I saw the need for it as REHDA Youth was not available in Penang when I first delved into the industry and a lot of it relied on self learning. It was a steeper learning curve at the time but having a group, of like-minded people, we could learn, grow together faster and help elevate our industry.

As for Era Malaysia, when I first embarked into the real estate industry in 2004, I saw a lot of room for growth. Era happens to be an international brand which provides international training to elevate our profession. They have a large presence in the Asia Pacific region being number one in Singapore and Indonesia. Hence, I went to speak to the perpetrators of Era in the US and Singapore as I felt they had the right system and best suited to us. After much discussion and collaboration, we started ERA Malaysia in 2007.

What are your plans and goals in the near future?

We are looking into asset management. It’s about owning a property, managing it and getting rental return instead of merely develop and sell. From there, we are diversifying into commercial suite with hospitality and hotel.There will be steady income if managed well on an annual basis.

We also hope to build more affordable homes with green features. Frankly speaking, green projects are expensive, but how to make it less expensive begins at the design stage. While all projects have to go through the similiar process, with proper orientation and appropriate design we are able to provide customers with the green features. And they can enjoy it without bearing additional cost. We might also need to expand the team to manage our commercial suites and flashpacker hotel(an affordable blend between backpacker and budget hotel for the budget travellers).