Sat Swaich, founder of Prime Property Group in Abbotsford, sat down with Ramneek Dhillon for her YouTube series 10 Questions with Ramneek on the Rooted and Rising channel. The conversation covers how Sat got into real estate as a university student, why he moved into land development, the hiring mistake that reshaped how PPG builds its team, and the daily habits he credits for keeping the business on track. The highlights are below:
Who is Sat Swaich outside the business?
Ramneek opened with the question most interviews skip. Sat’s answer was that the line between the business and the person is blurry, and he is fine with that.
“Our business is so intertwined in who we are personally,” he said. Off the clock, he describes himself as driven and competitive, a big foodie who loves to travel, and a sports junkie. “A pretty simple guy who just enjoys life.”
Where did the journey start?
Sat was born in India and moved to Canada at two, growing up in a first-generation family in the Fraser Valley like many of his neighbours. He played every sport available, collected the injuries to prove it, and started working young: blueberry season at 11 or 12, then a full-time job through high school as a Starbucks barista.
That barista job turned out to be formative, not because of the coffee but because of the clock.
“When you have a schedule and you know I’ve got to go to work at 9:00, I’m off at 5, I just dreaded it. I wanted to make my own hours. As an entrepreneur it’s not 40 hours, it’s going to be 90 hours a week. I get it. But to this day I would rather do 90 or 100 than go do 40 when I have a shift.”
Why real estate, and why at 22?
Sat got licensed at 22 while studying business full time at the University of the Fraser Valley. The logic was simple: if you are studying business, the best way to learn it is to do it.
Real estate was already in the house. His dad had been building homes on the side, and Sat had spent his early teens laying rebar for driveways and shovelling snow out of framed houses that did not have roofs yet.
He did not expect it to become his career. “At that time I thought, this is something really cool I can do while I go to university and figure it out. But obviously when I got in, there’s a reason I stayed. I love it.”
What do people get wrong about becoming an entrepreneur?
Ramneek pointed out that a lot of Punjabi youth in the Fraser Valley want to run their own business. Sat named two misconceptions, both specific to real estate but applicable anywhere.
The first is that the business is easy: big cheques for little work and minimal investment. It is not.
The second is the number of hats. “You’re your own marketing person. You’re your own administrative person. You’re your own business manager. You’re everything.” Most new entrepreneurs, especially those starting without capital, have no choice but to wear all of them.
The trap is never taking them off. “A lot of agents get stuck working in their business and not on their business,” Sat said. Agents hire an assistant, then micromanage over their shoulder because there are no systems or processes in place. “You are the gatekeeper of all the information,” and that is exactly what stops a business from scaling.
How did a realtor become involved in development?
Sat is careful about the label. Residential and investment real estate is the bread and butter, and PPG invests alongside clients rather than operating as a full-time developer. But the pull toward development started early and came down to one idea: creating value instead of waiting for it.
“When you look at a lot of investments, you say I could buy this home and it’s going to return me this much every year, or I could buy this and one day it might go up in value. What I loved about development was you could find a piece of property, and it’s that same piece of property, and you can create the value.”
His example: a lot zoned for single-family homes that could support townhomes. Take it through rezoning and the land is worth more whether or not the market moves. “I know why I’m creating value because I’m rezoning something or I’m building something.”
There was a second reason, and it ties back to how Sat works with clients. He wanted to be useful to developers, and the only honest way to do that was to go through the process himself.
“If I don’t have an answer, I’ll say I don’t have the answer. I don’t like going in a room and pretending I know something that I don’t know,” he said. Taking a rezoning application from start to finish taught him the timelines, the costs and the friction with the city. “Now when I bring you a site, I can speak your language and I can be more value to you.” That understanding is what allowed PPG to sell development sites, not the “fake it till you make it” approach he says he has always rejected.
The Google Ads campaign that landed a downtown Vancouver RFP
One of the best stories of the episode. Around 13 or 14 years ago, when few agents were running paid search, Sat took a university course on Google AdWords. That same night he went home, stayed up, and built a campaign for his own website.
A detached house in Abbotsford was selling for around $300,000 at the time, so he picked a higher-value asset to test: farms and acreages. He built a landing page and ran the ads.
Two weeks later an email arrived with the subject line RFP. He had to look up what a request for proposal was. It came from a large land-holding company with a downtown Vancouver office that buys agricultural land across the Fraser Valley, mines the gravel, reclaims the land to farm condition and sells it. They wanted a 22-year-old to interview for the job of selling their parcels.
He did not win that listing. He did get a different one from them, and sold it. “It was taking the small things and just trying to find the opportunity wherever you could.”
The hiring mistake that became a pillar of PPG
Ramneek asked about mistakes that cost money but paid back in lessons. On the investing side, Sat said most people in the market over the past four or five years made decisions driven by excitement about where prices were heading.
On the business side, the lesson was about people. Early on, running a team, he brought agents on based on sales experience and volume alone.
“What I learned really soon after that, the biggest thing for me is culture and character. It’s the right people on the bus. Anybody can learn our business. It’s not rocket science. But having the wrong culture or attitude within a team can really deteriorate the culture as a whole.”
Today character comes first in every hire at PPG. “I don’t care if you sold 100 houses last year. If you don’t fit in with the team, you don’t fit in with the team.”
What Sat looks for when hiring
Ask anyone on the PPG team and they will tell you Sat loves a spreadsheet. That extends to hiring, where he uses the DISC profile assessment on everyone he brings on.
DISC sorts people across four traits (dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness), and everyone carries some mix of each. Sat’s experience is that the profile holds up. “When I’ve run that DISC assessment and I spend six months or a year with that person after, it’s to a tee.”
The point is not to screen people out but to put them where they will succeed. A high-D, high-I person who is driven and wants to be out talking to people will not thrive in an administrative desk role, and neither will the person who put them there. Sat’s own profile leans toward the C side: cautious, pragmatic, organized. Many top-producing agents are the opposite, the type who can sell 200 homes and cannot explain how, which is why they need strong administrative support behind them.
After the assessment comes culture. The red flag is anyone who does not fit it.
Confidence versus ego
Ramneek’s favourite question to ask every guest: where is the line between confidence and ego once success arrives?
Sat credits his family. “I try to treat everybody equally, but I think that definitely comes from my mom.” He grew up around immigrant grandparents working multiple jobs and was involved in their businesses from a young age. “I don’t take anything for granted, and I still don’t.”
The habits behind the business
Consistency over intensity. That is the phrase Sat kept coming back to.
His daily anchors are getting up early and getting to the gym, not for the workout itself but for the mental clarity. “It’s more mental than it is physical. Just to keep that mental clarity and keep me even keel.”
The bigger habit is tracking. PPG has had quarterly and annual review systems in place since around 2014 or 2015. “You can’t improve what you don’t know.”
That carries into his personal life. His wife will confirm that family vacations come with an itinerary. Every year Sat takes a short break at year end to review the previous year’s goals and set the next ones. He does not call them New Year’s resolutions, and he revisits them through the year because life changes.
The hard part is looking at the goals you missed. “When things are going good, you want to see it. When you don’t, you don’t want to look at it. That’s why I have it in my calendar where it’s a set thing. It doesn’t matter what I want.”
Advice for a 20-year-old with ambition and no money
Find someone who is already succeeding in the industry you want and dedicate your time to being around them.
For real estate specifically, Sat’s answer was direct: join a team. “They didn’t really exist when I started, but if I joined a team, that would have grown my career exponentially. I would have sped it up by at least five years.”
His reasoning is that nobody needs to reinvent the wheel. The industry calls it R&D, rip off and duplicate. Look at what successful agents are doing, including in other markets, and replicate it. And spend time with successful people to learn their habits. “There’s nothing more valuable than that.”
Rapid fire
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Coffee or tea? Coffee. Easy.
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Morning or night? Morning.
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Books or podcasts? Books. He loses focus on podcasts.
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Biggest role model? His parents. His dad for work ethic, his mom for how she cares. “The next generations aren’t going to see the level of selflessness that we’ve seen from our parents.”
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One word the team would use to describe you? Driven.
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Dream vacation? The south of France with really good food.
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Favourite Punjabi food? Mom’s aloo paratha, no contest.