Helen Chong: From a Student Visa to the Top 1.5% of Real Estate Teams

Welcome to this episode of The Tori Nook Talk Show! In this episode, Tori sits down with Helen Chong, CCIM and founder of HAYLEN Group in San Jose, California. Helen has spent more than 20 years in real estate, moving from analyst work into residential, ultra-luxury, and finally commercial real estate investing. She serves on the board of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors, is a two-time president of the Northern California CCIM chapter, was named one of the top 100 Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, and her team ranks among the top 1.5% of real estate teams nationally. She is also the author of Power to Change Lives.

Helen's family went through bankruptcy when she was twelve, sending her parents to work in Indonesia and leaving her largely on her own by sixteen. She joined them in Indonesia, working in the restaurant they built where a plate of fried rice sold for fifty cents and a good day meant ten dollars. At eighteen she secretly applied for a student visa and came to America alone, starting at Santa Monica College while waitressing, selling pastries, tutoring, and taking unpaid internships to build a resume.

They discuss learning English by refusing to only socialize with other Hong Kong and Indonesian students, sending out hundreds of resumes to find a company willing to sponsor an H1B visa, why watching retirement accounts crash as a pension analyst pushed her into real estate, leaving a stable job in 2004 for mortgage brokering, founding HAYLEN Group around 2009 to do things her own way, and how earning her CCIM changed her career.

🎯 Topics covered:

Family bankruptcy at twelve and living alone by sixteen
Working her parents' Indonesian restaurant for pennies
Coming to America alone at eighteen on a student visa
Learning English by immersing in every culture but her own
Hundreds of resumes to find an H1B sponsor
Being the only woman in an all-male sales department
Why the pension analyst job pushed her into real estate
Leaving a stable job in 2004 to become a mortgage broker
Founding HAYLEN Group to do business her own way
Being questioned about how she earned her listings
How the CCIM designation changed her career
Final advice: success is happiness, not numbers