On a family trip home in late 2023, David and his wife were staying with his parents in Kuala Lumpur. One morning, he stepped out of the bathroom and noticed the bed already neatly made.
“Did you make the bed?” he asked his wife.
“No,” she replied. “The helper did.”
It was a small detail, but it lodged in his mind. Then it happened again. Rushing for a meeting, he ran downstairs asking for a shirt to be ironed. Every shirt, every pair of trousers had already been ironed and hung.
For David, who had spent years in Melbourne juggling work, parenting, and household chores, it wasn’t the “luxury” that struck him. It was the time. In Australia, that ironing, that cleaning, that cooking would have cost him hours of his day. In Kuala Lumpur, he realised, he could buy those hours back and reinvest them in building something bigger.
Two and seven hours
When they returned to Melbourne, he decided to quantify that feeling. He broke his month into “time blocks” and ran a simple experiment, if the family had help, how many hours of a typical working day could he buy back?
The answer, between two and seven hours, every single day.
“Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it,” he said. “I told my wife, I’d give up my involvement in Tiga Asia’s business in Australia just to get that 30-plus per cent of my life back.”
That realisation set off a chain reaction. Within months, David announced he was relocating to Malaysia. But to understand why time mattered so much to him, you have to rewind to where David started.
Multi-dollar
David is, as he puts it, “obviously Malaysian” but with a layered heritage. His mother is Sri Lankan Dutch, Australian-born; his father is Malaysian Chinese from Segamat, Johor, where, he jokes, “if you go to Segamat, there are a lot of Sias, it’s mostly our family.”
His grandfather emigrated from Fujian, China, and built an entrepreneurial empire in tar, brick, and furniture factories, and, most notably, in property development through the Sia Her Yam Group of Companies.
He was born and schooled in Segamat, did his SPM there, scored an A1 in Bahasa, and studied at a Chinese school long enough to speak, read, and write Mandarin, a skill that would later open doors in Australia. After Form Five, he attended boarding school in Melbourne, then Deakin University, where he completed a Marketing degree with majors in Marketing, Chinese, and Indonesian.
By his own admission, he wasn’t a model student.
“I was a bit of a monster,” he laughed. “I took risks when I was young. I trialled a lot of things. But that’s probably what made me who I am today.”
Throughout high school, he worked night shifts at Coles, stacking shelves before heading to class in the morning. That work ethic became a theme, “I’ve always worked,” he said simply.
100-work hours
Real estate came into the picture via his sister. At the time, she was heading CBRE’s retail business in Shanghai. She called one day and asked, “Do you want to do real estate?” Then she introduced him to CBRE Melbourne.
David walked into the interview knowing nothing about real estate. He had a marketing degree, not a property background. But his sister’s reputation preceded him.
“In short, I was hired because of my sister’s calibre,” David said. “Same bloodline,” he took the pun.
What followed were 100-hour work weeks and a crash course in commercial property. After CBRE, he moved to Colliers International, another global giant, eventually becoming Head of Asian Markets in Melbourne. It was a role that saw him picking up billionaires from private jets, structuring large deals, and learning how global capital thinks about property.
It also surfaced the frustrations that would drive him to step away from corporate life.
Tiga’s Tiga
Across both firms, David found himself constrained by politics, rigid processes, and a reluctance to pursue ideas even when the benefits were clear. Over time, the repeated “no’s”, often rooted in caution rather than merit, shaped his resolve to build a firm of his own. One grounded in people-first values, strong systems, and an uncompromising commitment to ethical decision-making.
In November 2019, David decided to leave. At the time, he held a senior and recognised position in the Australian market.
He called his brother Patrick, “Hey, want to start a company?”
That call became the seed of Tiga. The founding team was small and tight-knit, David, his brother Patrick, his right-hand colleague Martin (who later married David’s sister and became family), and Nick from the Hii family in Sarawak. Three families, one business.
“Why Tiga?” David said,“ Tiga because we are owned by three families. Tiga, because our three cores are Management, Leasing, and Sales, the life cycle of every asset. And Tiga, because we’re all Malaysian. Satu, Dua, Tiga.”
1000 calls
If timing is everything, Tiga’s timing was brutal. The company officially launched in April 2020, right as Melbourne entered what would become one of the world’s longest lockdowns. By July 2020, with the city shut and deals frozen.
“You feel sick,” David remembered. “You look at the account and think, I can’t pay wages next month.”
The founders went six months without paying themselves. They had two major deals on the table and made another big decision, buying back their investors’ stake. Within a week, stage four lockdown hit. The city went silent. Both deals collapsed.
“It was one of the worst moments,” he said. “You can sit there and sulk, or you can reverse engineer your survival.” The team looked at every line of business and asked a simple question, “Which can bring in the most money in the shortest time?”
Sales deals took too long to settle. Management fees were too small. The answer was tenant representation, representing tenants to find space and getting paid once the lease was signed.
They picked up the phones and made, by David’s estimate, a thousand calls.
One landmark result was relocating long-standing restaurant Red Emperor into the iconic Shark Fin House site on Little Bourke Street, a space with 40 years of history. Another was leasing a building in Port Melbourne to the Department of Education, turning it into a school.
“That was the proof,” he said. When the dollars hit our account, I told my brother, “If someone’s willing to pay us this money, the business model works.’”
Today, Tiga manages over a billion Australian dollars’ worth of assets in Melbourne, with integrated teams across management, leasing, and sales.
0 kickbacks
David’s relationship with leadership was shaped early. He once thought his first boss was “a lunatic” who overworked and exploited him. Years later, with the benefit of hindsight, he considers that same man the best boss he ever had. David reflected. “I was young, impatient, and I wanted everything now.”
His own leadership philosophy blends that tough-love apprenticeship with a clear moral line.
“We would never take any kickbacks,” he said. “We don’t take money back in any way. We’re happy to pay others out, but we won’t take money to give work to someone.”
He is equally obsessive about systems. In Australia, labour is expensive, and rights are robust; “Staff can call in sick because a pet is unwell and still work from home. Human error and human complexity are part of the terrain.”
“I’m moving away from relying on humans alone,” he said. “Systems don’t have bad days. They’re there to support humans.” Tiga’s backend team in Malaysia, all working from home, all serving Australian operations, is part of that equation.
‘ONE’
When David moved back in July 2025, it wasn’t a clean break. For almost a year, he flew between Kuala Lumpur and Melbourne every month. Over time, responsibilities were siloed; his brother-in-law took over more of the Melbourne management role, while David focused on building Tiga Asia’s residential business from Malaysia.
David concentrates on what he does best, Australian property for Asian buyers, particularly Malaysians and Singaporeans. Offering a one-stop journey – purchase, leasing, management, and, if needed, eventual sale.
Beyond the mechanics of property, though, David’s ambition is broader. “Our goal is to be the go-to guys that bridge Asia to Australia,” he said. “Today it’s real estate. Tomorrow it might be migration advice, mortgage funding, or something else entirely.
Crucially, his hierarchy is clear.
“In the way I live my life, I’m number one,” he said, unapologetically. “If I’m not happy, no one around me is happy, not my wife, not my kids, not my team. So I build things that align with both my happiness and my principles.”
For now, that means a life where his son can play in the pool, dinner’s on the table, and the extra hours can be poured into building Tiga Asia and the yet-to-be-named ventures that will follow.
And for anyone in Malaysia or the region looking towards Australia, whether it’s a first student apartment in Melbourne, a portfolio of assets across the capitals, or simply someone trustworthy to demystify how it all works, David’s proposition is simple:
“We’re the Australian real estate guys,” he said. “Anything Australia-related you need help with, start with us. If we don’t know the answer, we’ll find it, and we’ll both learn something new in the process.”
David Sia, Tiga Asia, MALAYSIA
