Esha Bhasin’s journey in the built environment has been nothing short of accomplished.
The above quote was just some of the praise Ashley Wheaton had for her dissertation at last year’s Property Awards – a dissertation that won her the Academic Award for Excellence. Since then, she’s been promoted to Senior Consultant and most recently, to Associate Director at JLL and has provided expert advice to her clients globally.
Esha has developed her passion and commitment to real estate and sustainability even further since graduating from UCEM. Today, she’s a budding thought leader, with her ideas leading her to champion new product and service offerings.
However, despite her clear drive and dedication to the field, real estate wasn’t always what Esha had in mind for her career.
Sitting in JLL’s Canary Wharf office, London, she told us how she first became interested in real estate and took the bold decision to go back to academia and change her career path.
I never even considered real estate as a career option.”
Like many of UCEM’s alumni, one of Esha’s parents – her father – works in the built environment. However, this isn’t actually what piqued her interest in real estate.
“Even though my dad is an architect, I never even considered real estate as a career option,” she told us.
“He has a construction and scaffolding company, so whenever I thought of the built environment, I immediately thought of hardhats and construction sites.”
Esha isn’t alone in having been unaware of the ‘professional’ and ‘service’ side of the built environment. Our sector has an antiquated (and often male-dominated) perception that belies its breadth and diversity.
“I was very naïve - I thought you had to be an architect or contractor. I didn’t realise that real estate has this whole service and consulting aspect to it.”
“It’s only since coming to JLL that I’ve appreciated how fragmented the built environment is,” Esha said on her impressions of the sector. “We’ve got so many teams here… if you ask any of them what they do, they will tell you something completely different. Even now, I wouldn’t say I’ve got a full command over who does what.”
Aside from her father, Esha didn’t have much in the way of exposure to the built environment when growing up either, and doesn’t recall hearing about it in schools.
“The built environment is often such a passive sector. It’s not one of those things that gets talked about at school… when I was young, no one got up and said ‘I want to be a real estate consultant’. You hear a lot about people pursuing medicine and law, but real estate is almost this quiet profession that no one really talks about.
"When I started out in real estate, I felt like I was the only person who came from a non-real estate background, which is ironic because my dad is an architect.
"As I got further into the industry, I felt maybe the pools that people hired from were very narrow in terms of it being a select few universities and backgrounds, or only people who’ve got family and have already worked in the consulting side of things. It’s narrow in that sense, but it’s definitely becoming more diverse.”
“My biggest concern was that I was already a year and a half into my IT consulting role.”
When it came to attending university, the built environment didn’t factor into Esha’s plans.
She attended University College London (UCL), completing a BSc in Economics and Geography. She then joined Atos, an information technology company, on a graduate scheme in September 2019. However, Esha quickly realised this wasn’t the field for her.
“To be honest, I wasn’t enjoying my career in IT,” she said. “In consulting, you’ve got to really sell what you’re talking about. If you’re not interested in it, you’re not going to be able to do that very well.”
In the months leading up to joining the IT consultancy, Esha undertook an internship which happened to be with a residential property developer. Reflecting upon this experience as she navigated IT consulting, Esha was able to draw parallels between the two career paths, and found herself constantly gravitating to real estate over IT.
"I realised that this whole consulting and service aspect existed in real estate, which I thought was very interesting. Then, when I actually started IT consultancy, I realised that I preferred real estate.”
“My biggest concern was that I was already a year and a half into my IT consulting role… If I was to go on a graduate scheme with JLL, I’d be restarting my career.”
On what she’d say to others who may be considering a change of career path, Esha recommends having conversations with people working in the profession to glean insight.
“The built environment is so incredibly fragmented… you have agency, consulting, development, investment, planning… there are so many areas. Whilst one profession in the sector may not seem aligned to your interest, there are so many others to explore as well.
"The other thing is that every person will tell you something different, so don’t base your opinion on what just one person has said – try and have a conversation with a range of people. You never know where that conversation can lead you.”
“For me, when I had my internship, it was a very informal conversation where they told me they needed an extra pair of hands. I didn’t go in with any conscious intention of working in the field.”
When it came to making her own decision, Esha’s passion for real estate and her experience in her internship is what ultimately drove her to make the switch and go back on a graduate scheme with JLL.
“I found myself constantly drawn to elements of real estate. I found myself reading about it, talking about it… to actually find something you’re that interested in is quite rare. The fact I was enjoying it so much made it a no brainer for me when it was time to make a decision.”
“I weighed up the pros and cons. I thought about the fact that I was going to be doing this for the rest of my life every single day, and in the end, I wanted to be in an industry that I actually enjoyed and found interesting.”
Esha decided to accept JLL’s offer. She’d continue consulting – her favourite aspect of what she’d been doing in IT – but instead in a field she was passionate about: real estate.
“I thought: ‘Oh gosh, I’ve got to do this fluffy thing called sustainability…’”
Esha joined JLL on a non-cognate graduate scheme, but it didn’t start out exactly as she’d expected.
At the beginning of her career, she went on secondment to the COP26 United Nations (UN) High-Level Climate Champions.
“I didn’t choose to work on sustainability, I actually got allocated it”, she told us. “I thought ‘oh gosh, I’ve got to do this fluffy thing called sustainability…’ I wanted to do investment and agency work, and dominate in that field.”
“That role was, honestly, life changing for me. It made me really appreciate the impact our sector has on climate change. The work I did there has formed the basis of my advice for clients.”
In her role with the UN, Esha helped companies across the built environment make net zero carbon commitments. Despite her early doubts, this experience ultimately sparked her interest in sustainability.
For her graduate scheme, Esha was sponsored by JLL to study MSc Real Estate with UCEM, in order to become a Chartered Surveyor.
“I wasn’t aware of UCEM beforehand,” she said. “I didn’t have a problem with online learning, to be honest. For me, it gave me the flexibility to do my work life and academia at the same time. It also helped me balance my studies around my personal life.
“When I started, I did feel isolated,” Esha admitted. “This was during COVID-19, so I hadn’t met people at JLL who were also doing the Master’s. It was tough at the time, because you don’t necessarily have a gauge of whether you’re studying enough, if you’re performing well… you don’t get to talk to your peers like you do at a physical campus.
"I’d finished university quite a while before, so it took some time to get into it, but once I started joining group chats with my peers and contributing on forums, I felt less isolated. We used to talk to each other, brainstorm, share questions, and I began to feel like there was a group of us working together.”
Esha emphasised the value of her studies in giving her a foundation of knowledge that she’s built upon since in her role at JLL.
“When I studied at UCL, it was great because it was my first time going to university, but a lot of what I was studying wasn’t directly applicable to my career. At UCEM, the fact it was online meant I could sit down and absorb information as I wasn’t so distracted by people – it meant that my prime focus was what I was studying for, rather than learning for the sake of it.
"The MSc was great – it covered multiple disciplines within real estate and in doing so, it provided a holistic understanding of the industry, a baseline for me as I have gone into my professional career.
"The thing with consulting is that it doesn’t directly relate to the Master’s or the Assessment of Professional Competence (APC), but what they’ve given me is loads of knowledge of different parts of the real estate industry. It’s given me that foundation of understanding.”
“The MSc was great – it covered multiple disciplines within real estate and in doing so, it provided a holistic understanding of the industry, a baseline for me as I have gone into my professional career.”
I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into writing that assignment.”
Sustainability wasn’t a central component of Esha’s degree, but after discovering her passion through COP26, her dissertation assignment gave her the freedom to dive deeper into the topic.
“Sustainability just happened to be something I was interested in, but in the dissertation, I got to explore it further.”
It ended up becoming the focus of her dissertation, lengthily titled ‘An investigation into the relevance of BREEAM accreditations for office buildings in Central London amongst net zero carbon emissions and the coinciding investor understanding of BREEAM as an assessment tool’.
“Graeme was very, very helpful. I would pick his brain a lot. When I was writing my dissertation, my mum was sick. I was quite literally working from the hospital a lot of the time. The whole time, Graeme was so nice and so understanding. He really stuck out for me in my time at UCEM.”
During this time, Esha received support from her dissertation supervisor, UCEM lecturer Dr Graeme Whitehall.
“As soon as I first encountered Esha it was clear what an exceptionally intelligent and articulate student she was,” Graeme told us. “It rapidly became apparent how passionate she was about her research topic and the underlying clarity of vision she had as to how she and her colleagues could subsequently make a positive impact in respect of climate change. Throughout her dissertation she evidenced unrelenting commitment and tenacity despite the wider challenges she faced at that time.
"Esha was a pleasure teach. Not just because she was always so exquisitely well-mannered, affable, and unrelentingly reliable but because, as a lecturer its always invigorating to encounter students that challenge and stretch you - Esha was undoubtedly such a student. She never baulked at a challenge or glossed over an inconvenient finding but always interrogated problems to the last degree so that they transformed into valuable insights and understanding. The result of which, and her ability to convey her ideas in an exceptionally accomplished writing style, was an outstanding piece of research. Moreover, it is exactly the type of research that is required if we are serious about creating robust science-based metrics upon which we assess ESG.”
Esha admits to having been very surprised to receive the Academic Excellence Award at UCEM’s 2023 Property Awards ceremony.
“It was really unexpected. I just went along for the day with my mum, thinking that we could get a nice lunch or dinner at whatever time it was after this event. I never went there expecting to be the winner, so I felt very, very proud. I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that assignment, so I felt very good that all that work paid off. Also, my mum was crying when I received it,” she laughed, “so it was very emotional for both of us.
“Would I recommend doing a dissertation on sustainability? Sure. There’s so much literature out there now that you can play with. It’s also something that’s at the forefront of our industry right now, so you have the ability to influence the sustainability agenda through your work – you can really make an impact. The dissertation gave me the ability to go deeper into sustainability, which is something I can now consult on in my career.”
As Graeme noted:
“It is absolutely no surprise that Esha has harnessed her undoubted capabilities and passion for sustainability so effectively in her workplace over the ensuing years. It’s also gratifying to hear UCEM and especially her dissertation really helped support her on her path. That’s ultimately what we are here for.”
Real estate is a big part of the climate change problem, so we need to be a big part of the solution.”
In April, Esha was promoted to Senior Consultant with JLL. In October, she will be promoted again to Associate Director with JLL. In her role, she helps companies futureproof their real estate portfolios and operations and align their strategic objectives.
“I specialise in urban regeneration, master planning, transformation and change, portfolio strategy and facilities management strategy.”
“Every project I’ve worked on this year has been pretty unique. I’ve done a facility management strategy for a smart city in the Middle East. I also worked on a cool project for this client in the oil and gas industry. I designed and conceptualised an innovation and decarbonisation campus for them.”
“I’ve worked on development appraisals for local authority clients, performed ‘stay vs go’ for clients spanning private and public sectors, and written playbooks on mergers and acquisitions and master planning. A playbook is a document that a company can follow so they can determine whether a site is, for example, good for master planning. It will include governance processes, decision making points, and so on. All of these projects have been very diverse.”
Despite, in her own words, not being something she ‘specialises in’, Esha’s expertise on sustainability hasn’t gone unnoticed at JLL – her work on the topic has been making the rounds via Teams.
“Sustainability is a big subject area for myself; it’s not something I specialise in, per se – it’s part of all of my advice.
"I just wrote this paper on responsible leasing, which essentially says you need to look beyond just green leasing and consider the S and G of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). Even though I wrote it with a sustainability mindset, it’s now something that our agency teams are deploying – I ended up sharing it on an internal Teams page and it just blew up.
"A lot of the time, when people think of sustainability, they only think of the environment. This is of course super important, but what I keep trying to put through in all my advice is that you don’t just have to consider the E in ESG – you need to consider all three in tandem.
"I really enjoy writing. I have so many ideas I want to push further."
Esha identifies Katie Kopec, Head of Strategic Development Consulting at JLL, as one of her biggest inspirations and career models so far.
“I have been fortunate that, during my time at JLL, I have worked with some incredible and inspiring women.
"I used to work with Strategic Development Consulting, so I used to be on Katie’s team. She’s great. She does a lot of regeneration and placemaking projects, and I think she’s a pioneer for that in our industry.
"Outside of her day-to-day, Katie has also been an amazing advocate for diversity. She put me up for this Chapman Barrigan lecture last year. I was on a panel event with very senior people in the industry and I got the chance to talk about diversity.
"Katie has been very encouraging, and the work she’s done for diversity and pushing for change in real estate has been great.”
“Working with Esha is always a great experience,” Katie told us. “She is always pushing the boundaries and her enthusiastic approach is brilliant. I have a team motto – keep learning – and she demonstrates this all the time. She is articulate and engaging and listens to counsel – she will be a great consultant as her experience grows and she keeps pushing herself and others to excel.”
I really want to drive urgent climate action for everyone, everywhere.”
When asked what she loves most about her role, Esha points to the breadth and variety of consulting.
“For me, it’s the dynamism of the career – the ability to specialise in something where you can still work on other things that are very different.”
“If you like dynamism, you’ll get that in real estate consulting. You’re constantly using different skills, solving problems. Given the diverse nature of consulting, all the projects I work on are very different.”
Looking forward, Esha plans to further explore her passion for thought leadership and continue championing sustainability in her role.
“I’m writing an article at the moment about a new product and service offering I’m trying to create at JLL.
"I want to continue pushing the sustainability agenda through my work. I also want to push my thought leadership efforts more.”
Asked to reflect on last year’s COP28 and the future of the sector, Esha took a more positive stance than most, urging the built environment to reflect on its successes and push for greater action – a push she will no doubt have a significant part in as her career progresses.
“We have a profound impact on the ability to reduce global warming.
"I think people need to appreciate how far the built environment has come. There needs to be a reflection on how much we’ve done for sustainability.
"We made some commitments at COP28, so it’s now up to all of us within this fragmented sector to come together, work collectively and go further, faster.”
