Meet Heikal Shafrudin
A property decision, made well, can change a family's financial future for decades.
I've carried that belief for seventeen years, since I started in this industry in September 2009. Not because I read it in a book. Because I watched it play out in my own family, years before that.
Through the highs and the lows of multiple market cycles in the 1990s, as a kid, I saw how property quietly shaped what was possible for my parents, and what it had taken away from us.
That belief hasn't changed. Everything around it has.
This has always been my only career
Real estate isn't a second act for me. I came in young, right after National Service, and I've never left the industry since.
The closest thing to a career switch in my story was stepping up to lead a team, after a decade of just focusing on client sales. By then, I had enough market experience and hard-earned perspective to give other advisors real direction, not just technique.
The gap I kept seeing
Having started in this role early on, I saw a side to the industry that many won't admit openly. It's a high-stakes sales industry, everyone optimised for deal closing. We get the client excited, manage the objections, chase for the signature on the dotted line. What about the client's long-term financial position? Well, that's someone else's problem, or maybe it's just a problem for another day.
Along the way, I kept meeting clients on the other side of that approach, and soon, I realised, I couldn't work in that high-stakes, cut-throat mode.
I met families who had already stretched their finances and wiped out their CPF, with nothing left as a buffer. Then income would shift: overtime cut, a job change, a health scare. And everything came apart.
This was the same mistake, just working in the other direction. Eventually, I helped clients sell units that had been bought to maximise the developer's profits, not theirs. Units primed for launch profits, not resale profits. So when these clients came to me to cash out, they discovered the profit simply wasn't there.
In Singapore, a property decision is almost impossible to reverse. The policies make sure of it. Every purchase here is forced to be a long-term commitment. Done well, it builds a family's financial future over decades. Done badly, it breaks it. The difference is rarely the property. It's the structure behind the decision.
That single realisation became the foundation of everything I do.
I walk the same path I ask my clients to walk
I'm not just an advisor. I'm an investor and a homeowner who has applied the same principles to my own decisions that I ask my clients to apply to theirs.
For many years, my wife and I lived as a dual-income household with no children. That freedom gave me a particular lens on financial planning: not just what we could afford today, but what financial independence could look like at fifty. I structured my own property decisions through that lens. Long-term. Stress-tested. Built for survivability, not just affordability.
Then I became a father.
Everything I thought I understood about property deepened further. Legacy, protecting income and wealth, making decisions that outlast the moment. It also solidified everything I had already been planning for my clients.
I wasn't advising families from the outside anymore. I was one. With the same fears, the same hopes, the same aspirations, and the same need to get it right — and yes, the same "can we even afford this" moment late at night.
This perspective isn't something I picked up on a course. It came from hundreds of client meetings, and from making the same decisions myself, with the same money, the same fears, and the same stakes.
Building something bigger than one agent
At some point I realised the impact I wanted to create couldn't scale through me alone.
If families across Singapore were making property decisions without a proper financial safety framework, without anyone willing to ask the hard questions, the answer wasn't for me to work harder. It was to build a team that operated by the same beliefs.
That became HeroHomes.
Today I lead a team of 50+ agents. The standard I hold them to is the same one I hold myself to. The advice has to be ethical. The direction has to be sustainable. The client's outcome, not the commission, is the measure of whether we did our job.
I'm proud to be leading household names in the Singapore real estate industry today, a young and self-driven bunch who have set new standards for the rest of us to follow.
That's not a slogan. It's a daily operational decision. Every agent on this team is trained to tell a client when the numbers don't work. Every agent is trained to walk away from a deal that puts a family at risk.
A deal that closes but breaks a family is not a deal worth closing.
What 17 years actually teaches you
I've been through multiple market cycles. I've seen euphoria push families into decisions they spent years recovering from. I've seen fear keep families on the sidelines while their equity sat idle. I've watched this market reward patience and punish urgency.
Here's what I know now that I couldn't have known at the start. Get the structure right, and the market becomes manageable. Get it wrong, and even a good property becomes a burden.
I've been featured in CNA, Berita Harian, Seedly, and AsiaOne, and interviewed on Mediacorp's Detik programme. I've been recognised by PropNex as a top producer and senior team leader. I've helped hundreds of families upgrade safely across every market condition this industry has thrown at us.
Yet, none of that is why you should work with me.
Why you should work with me
You should work with me if you want someone who will tell you the truth. Even when the truth is that you're not ready. Even when the truth means walking away from a unit you love. Even when the truth is uncomfortable — no sugarcoating, lah.
I've been in your shoes. I've made the same calculations, felt the same pull between aspiration and caution, and had to make decisions my future self would either thank me for or regret.
I chose the framework over the feeling. Every time.
If you want to see that thinking applied to real decisions, my Insights page is where I break it down. The numbers, the trade-offs, the ones I'd have said no to.
Heikal Shafrudin · Associate Group District Director · PropNex Realty, Singapore · CEA Reg No. R016820G