Reem Kseibati is a real estate strategist who spent over ten years working in Dubai and is now a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kseibati — who has lived in London, Beirut and Dubai — came to Brandeis to discuss her passion for real estate, her thoughts on development in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and lessons learned from her work in the region. 

When Allan Feldman ’26 founded the Middle East and North Africa Economics club earlier this fall semester, he wanted to organize a group that would provide educational and pre-professional opportunities for students interested in working in economics and business in the MENA region. Asking Kseibati to speak about her decade-long career there was a no-brainer.

“The region really has deployed real estate and infrastructure development as a key driver for their wider economic and social development,” Kseibati shared at the Nov. 20 MENA Economics event. 

Kseibati worked with Jones Lang LaSalle, a commercial real estate company, and then moved on to Ernst and Young, a multinational accounting firm. She aided clients in creating large-scale developments in the GCC that are projected to reach over 200,000 jobs, contribute over 50 billion U.S. dollars to the region’s economies and conserve 760 square kilometers of naturally significant sites. 

Her key clients consisted of sovereign wealth funds, government ministries like the Ministry of Tourism and regional developers. What Kseibati calls the “bread and butter” of her work was advising on the strategic and financial considerations in deciding what to do with a particular stretch of land. As these land parcels were typically expansive sites over five square kilometers, Kseibati’s impact on local landscapes has been deeply transformative.

Developments in real estate and infrastructure enhance job creation and help diversify the economies of the GCC, Kseibati said. Her job was thinking about the best way this can be done — “What kind of development does the region really need?”

In thinking about these questions, Kseibati said that it’s important to keep in mind that the countries in the GCC are economically incomparable to the Middle Eastern countries outside of the union, emphasizing that it is “a very different beast.” She explained that these nations, while newer, have still had their period of establishing stability. Dubai, for instance, invested in key infrastructure in the 1970s following the oil boom. This was a turning point towards improving the quality of life in the city.

“They’ve had that chance to really lay these foundations for further growth,” she said, whereas other countries, such as Egypt, might not have had the same opportunity for economic stability that would have allowed them to reach their full potential and focus on other sectors such as real estate.

On being a woman working in the region, Kseibati prefaced her reflection by noting her luck in finding a supportive network of women colleagues. “The kind of support that I found was really pertinent to the resilience that I had while working there,” she said. With that said, Kseibati shared that first and foremost, she was regarded as a guest.

“The Middle East really isn’t a monolith.” She elaborated, “There’s such a diversity not only in culture but attitudes as well.” Given this complexity, Kseibati felt that she was perceived as an outsider, above any other facet of her identity. Because she was exploring and helping develop remote regions, she felt she needed to be sensitive to local surroundings and culture. 

Kseibati did conduct business in some remote areas in which segregation of the sexes was still customary. She recalled one incident when she was trying to negotiate business with someone and was entirely ignored because he would have rather spoken to her male colleague. 

“But it’s key to note that in my ten years in the Middle East, that happened once,” she said, recalling that the support and camaraderie she had with her team allowed her to easily brush off the interaction. Other than this, her experience in the region was overall a positive one. 

Kseibati would encourage young pre-professionals to consider working in the Middle East. “The education rate is high, the population is high, they’re entrepreneurial, the culture is by nature hospitable,” she said. These characteristics are ones that she believes would resonate with many Americans.

Now working towards a Master of Science and Real Estate Development at MIT, Kseibati is once again plunged into the job market cycles of a foreign country — except now, she is no longer working as a specialist in an emerging real estate market. Despite her breadth of experience, she feels as though her transferable skills tend to be overlooked. “There’s a very hefty line of people with local market knowledge who are just as capable as I am,” she said. She figures that recruiters would rather hire someone who has experience in the U.S. than dig into an international candidate’s resume. 

But Kseibati stands firm in her love for real estate. She spoke about how in college, she was unsure of what she wanted to do with her life until, by chance, she ended up taking a real estate course. “The puzzles in my head just fell into place,” she said. 

Having moved around a great deal growing up, Kseibati says she saw how the built environment frames our realities and the way we see the world. The year she graduated, JLL had just launched the first cohort of an existing graduate real estate program in the Middle East. After having worked as a consultant with JLL, Kseibati realized that her passion lies more in the strategy side of land development and moved on to work at EY in 2016. 

As soon as she got to EY, she was staffed on one of the first major projects that was announced in Saudi Arabia, AMAALA, a luxury tourism destination. She says that the sheer volume of work in this time period gave her a degree of exposure and experience that built up her portfolio. 

At EY, Kseibati was problem solving, building knowledge databases and constructing models from scratch. These systems that she and the members of her cohort were streamlining were passed onto newer employees who began joining their team. This trial and error process —  which in a matter of a few years will have created hundreds of thousands of jobs — is what Kseibati says is “the most meaningful thing that I ever did.”