Special Feature
Francis Tan: A stellar real estate career comes full circle
In February 2021, Tan brokered the sale of the $128.8 million Nassim Road GCB, the highest psf on record for development land (Photo: EdgeProp Singapore)
Most mornings, long before his clients are awake, Francis Tan has already been for a swim, read the papers and poured his second cup of coffee. It is a routine that goes back to his days as a junior college teacher, when the school bell at seven left no room for a slow start. Three decades on, the routine stayed — and so, it turns out, did the man behind it.
Earlier this year, after more than a decade that took him from top sales agent, to company co-founder, to CEO, and finally group COO of a Hong Kong Exchange-listed fund manager, Tan stepped away from corporate life and returned to the ground — back to clients, properties, mentoring and the work that first drew him in. The same discipline that shaped him as a teacher is now carrying him back to where he began.
Full circle, he calls it. When you understand how he got here, it is hard to disagree.
Now at SRI as chief development officer, Tan is focused on mentoring, technology, and being directly involved in life-changing property decisions. (Photo: EdgeProp Singapore)
The teacher who never left
Before he was a CEO, Tan was an engineer by training and a teacher by calling. He taught General Paper and Project Work at a junior college under the Ministry of Education, where the interdisciplinary, reading-heavy work demanded that he stay curious. Tan loved it.
“I had to read a lot, and it opened my mind. As the teacher was teaching the student, the teacher was also learning about life,” he reflects.
But on a civil servant’s salary, with an eye on property and very little capital to invest, he saw only one way forward. After completing his bond and seven years in teaching, he gave up a postgraduate scholarship and entered real estate agency work — a move many of his peers would not have made 17 years ago.
By 2011 and 2012, he was the top project agent at Savills Residential. As his team grew, the instinct to teach resurfaced. Tan began sharing his learnings in small group sessions of 40, which eventually grew into a full training curriculum for Scotia Academy when he co-founded SLP Scotia in 2013. At its peak, the academy had over 1,000 agents. Courses ran free of charge.
“Our goal was to democratise knowledge,” Tan says. “We were not after the money.”
Through mergers, he became CEO and KEO of SLP International Property Consultants, and later executive director and group COO of ZACD Group — the HKEX-listed fund manager and licensed developer that SLP’s success helped build. He also sits on the executive council of the Singapore Institute of Estate Agents (SIEA), now into his third term. The teacher, through all of it, never really left.
Tan is a teacher that never left. He created a full training curriculum for Scotia Academy when he co-founded SLP Scotia in 2023. (Photo: EdgeProp Singapore)
Seeing the future, selling the vision
In February 2021, Tan brokered the sale of a Good Class Bungalow (GCB) plot on Nassim Road for $128.8 million — to this day Singapore’s most expensive GCB transaction on a psf basis for development land. There was no completed home. Just a hilltop, a gentle slope and a colonial era house that was older than himself.
Tan, however, envisioned a future masterpiece before anyone else did.
“When I saw the land on the hilltop of Nassim Road, I could already see the natural basement in the terrain. I told the buyer: this is limited edition; this is going to be a masterpiece,” Tan recalls.
The buyer, Jin Xiaoqun, who is the wife of the founder of SGX mainboard listed Nanofilm Technology International, Dr Shi Xu, agreed. He did not only brokered the deal but the development arm of the ZACD Group was subsequently appointed as overall project manager for the development. Today, the ultra-modern GCB at 30 Nassim Road, formerly known as Ladyvale, is well on track to attaining Temporary Occupation Permit in 2026. What was once a quiet hilltop house on one of Singapore’s most sought-after addresses is now the landmark residence that Tan believed it would be.
Three years earlier before that record breaking deal, Tan had shown what it meant to convince at scale — articulating his vision not to one buyer, but to hundreds of owners at once. In 2019, he persuaded more than 82% of the strata owners of Sim Lim Square to bring the iconic commercial property to the collective sale market, helping hundreds of investors and business operators trust that the exit being offered was worth letting go of something they had built their livelihoods around.
Tan played a key role in Singapore’s record-breaking Nassim Road GCB transaction, seeing development potential before others did. (Photo: EdgeProp Singapore)
The intricate knowledge of a true practitioner
What sets Tan apart is fluency across the entire property vertical. From closing transactions for individual families, to bidding on Government Land Sales parcels to managing full development projects, with his last project The Landmark, a 40-storey luxury condominium at Chin Swee Road, which attained its Temporary Occupancy Permit in November 2025, each role layered a different kind of knowledge onto the last.
That knowledge shows up in details that others miss. For instance, Tan will tell you that when converting a semi-detached house into a detached bungalow, the apparent prestige of a detached bungalow might not always correspond to usable space.
“Setback requirements mean the gross floor area is often smaller,” Tan shares. “A detached house sounds bigger. On the ground, it is not, unless you plan it correctly.”
These finer details separate genuine advice from a sales pitch.
That same eye shaped his work as COO of ZACD Group in bringing Arina East Residences to launch in June 2025 — a luxury freehold twin-tower development at Tanjong Rhu and the first new residential project in the neighbourhood in over 13 years — where the finishes and spatial planning hints of design elements borrowed from GCB projects, reflected years of knowing what Singapore’s most discerning buyers truly want.
Creating a legacy for families
As a father who has watched his own three daughters grow into adults, Tan now speaks about property not as an asset class, but as a foundation — something you build not for yourself, but for the people that come after you, or before you, as in the case of parents.
He thinks back to a couple he met in Punggol more than a decade ago. They had a hdb flat, two incomes and a quiet hope of giving their children something better, but could not see how to make it work.
Tan sat down with them, did the sums, walked them through selling their flat, freeing up their equity and buying their first executive condo — right across the road from where they had been living.
Today, that couple owns two properties and is planning retirement in one. When the family experienced a medical emergency in the years that followed, the financial position they had carefully built gave them options when they needed it the most.
Tan views property not as an asset class, but as a foundation you build for your future generation. (Photo: EdgeProp Singapore)
Coming full circle back to what matters most
The story from Punggol is playing out across Singapore today, Tan believes, at a scale few anticipated. HDB owners who bought their flats 10 to 15 years ago at around $450,000 are sitting on properties worth close to a million dollars. After settling loans, many dual-income households hold cash and CPF Ordinary Account reserves of around $750,000, before savings and investments.
“These families are not just asset-rich on paper. They are genuinely cash-rich but not in the traditional sense. And most of them haven’t worked out what that means for what can come next,” he says.
That gap is where Tan wants to be. To lead and guide, as he takes on his next chapter as chief development officer of SRI, he returns to what he has always done best — mentoring, advising, listening and sitting across the table, doing the work and being present for the decision that changes a person’s future.
He is returning with something no boardroom can give: the lived understanding of what it feels like to help a young couple take that first step, or helping agents under his wings realise their dreams and the quiet satisfaction of watching where those steps eventually lead.
Being an avid coder who studied computer science while he was in junior college, Tan has funded and launched many free technology and property analytics apps on the apple and android app stores that can help agents and buyers. “The playing field is now very level.” he said, “having powerful apps is no longer only in the domain of very large agencies.” This technology frontier is also something that he hopes to drive in his new role at SRI. He also hopes his little contribution to agent technology can help the owners of the smaller agencies that he met during his work at SIEA in view of the more stringent operating requirements in recent times.
“I’ve bid for land parcels, led investments, advised on collective sales and built teams. But real estate is about people, clients and fellow practitioners and their most important decisions. I want to be present for that,” he says. “That is not something you get in a boardroom every day.”
For more information,
Contact Francis Tan | 87880368
Chief Development Officer (R009034H)
SRI Pte Ltd
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