Thu 4 Jan 2007
... with Bashar Issa
This month, Michael Dineen talks to Bashar Issa of BSC Group about sociology and building.
At 28 Bashar Issa is something of a phenomenon, for he heads a development group which is making a distinct impression on Manchester’s skyline while colonising New York and Beijing at the same time.He does not see himself as unusual, though, because when he was little more than a schoolboy he was already buying and selling expensive German sports cars, and by the relatively mature age of 19 had made a small fortune playing the stock market.
Half Kuwaiti, half Iraqi, and all Middle Eastern trader, Bashar earned a handsome living while studying for his degrees – plural – at London University.
In his easy fluent way he explained: ”The study was not difficult. Ninety per cent of the time people worry about exams, but if you just put your mind to it, sit down and do the work, you get it done.”
If that simple statement makes him seem enviably focused, that is just what he is today.
The purchase of smart German cars, cheaper on the Continent than in the UK and therefore loaded with profit potential, led him inevitably to currency dealings.
These proved more interesting to Bashar’s highly developed mathematical brain, and soon he abandoned cars for the more absorbing study of currencies’ ebb and flow.
Almost inevitably he became fascinated by the workings of the stock market where he both made and lost money. All this while he was a student still in his teens.
Asked about his abiding interests he told me: mathematics and sociology, and in the event it seems that the sociological aspect of stocks and shares interests him more than the money.
“I realised that it was all about how companies are run. It’s about management of people.”
He admits to learning the hard way about the stock market, but was mature enough to quit playing it while he still had enough in the pot he had earned from international currency dealing to get him into London real estate.
This, though a modest investment in a run-down one-bedroom Maida Vale flat which he converted into a smart two-bedroom apartment, was the beginning of his career in property development.
Since then he has not looked back, though he found new horizons away from the Capital where the competition was too tough for a beginner. He moved in on Manchester’s regeneration boom.
Today BSC Group – described as “a series of independent contributing companies fronted by chief executive officer Bashar Issa” – has 1,200 flats under construction in Manchester, as well as 220 hotel rooms; four large mixed schemes centred around the Piccadilly basin and Ancoats urban village.
Clearly, although he comes from an academic family (his mother settled in London to complete her PhD studies in micro-biology ) sociology is much more than a subject to be read at university for Bashar.
He applied it to the assessment of quoted companies, as we have seen, and more recently to the choice of market BSC should be aiming for.
“I tend to think of how much people are earning and what mortgages they can afford. So, we are focused on affordable homes in the areas we develop,” he says.
He identifies his markets very clear-sightedly – whether they are for sports cars, for currencies or for homes. So, perhaps it is because his young mind is uncluttered by hang-ups, but it seemed to me his approach to business is essentially can do.
He surrounds himself by people with skills and experience to make things happen. There are more than 40 such professionals in BSC, and the payroll doesn’t stop there; unusually he chooses to employ around 300 skilled site workers as well – because he likes to have firm control of quality, timing and so on.
This ethos of “can-do” has a familiar transatlantic ring to it, and Bashar is no stranger to the United States. Surely it’s difficult to get into the development market there, I suggested. “Quite the contrary. Most of the people I’ve met there are extremely keen to do business.”
So, backed by the kind of diligence involving the expert opinions of local engineers, architects and lawyers, Bashar has been able to get the support he needs from American financiers for projects such as the regeneration of the massive former Staedler Hotel in Buffalo, New York.
Spending $200,000 on a site assessment that allows US bankers to tick all their boxes makes very good sense to Bashar, and having seen how it works in the Land of Opportunity he is more inclined to develop there than in European countries – whose currency he trusts less than the dollar.
Apart from its development wing BSC has a management company to handle the homes they keep as investments, and more recently they have moved into building materials procurement. “I was buying building materials that were made in China, so I went to Beijing to set up a supply company and now we get our materials for a fraction of the price,” he told me.
He makes it sound easy and logical. Logical too to convert one of the large redundant buildings in Buffalo as a store for these cheap Chinese building materials.
One is tempted to ask him that standard journalists’ question: “To what do you owe your success?” So, I did, and he laughed before replying thoughtfully, “Well, I’m very hands-on, very focused. Life is work and work is my enjoyment of life.”
Bearing in mind his ability to interweave intensive university study with making money from his own business initiatives, I also suggested that he could follow his family’s academic path by becoming a lecturer himself, telling other youngsters how he did it. I should have known better. A London University don has already asked Bashar, a former student, to address his faculty on the subject of entrepreneurism.
But doing business, making things happen is as natural to Bashar Issa as breathing, I suspect; he’d rather do it than talk about doing it!
First published in Show House Magazine January 2007.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but some information contained within this article may have changed since it was first published.
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