Zeeshan Bhimji
By Zoë Eitel
Graduating in 2009 at the height of the recession, Zeeshan Bhimji saw an opportunity to fill a need people had and decided to start his own business. Zee created Real Property Management Chicago to help homeowners rent out their spaces during a time when owning property became too expensive for many to sustain and selling wasn’t economically practical.
Zee says he handled every role himself as he built the company up from scratch. Now, Real Property has been voted as a top producer by the Chicago Association of Realtors and has joined the prestigious 1000 Club for property management companies. The success of his first business was motivating. Zee has opened a Code Ninjas franchise with a fellow DePaul alumnus to teach children to code and has found a passion project in co-founding the technology realty startup ShowingHero.
President and Founder of Real Property Management Chicago
Co-Founder of ShowingHero Tech Startup
Franchisee at Code Ninjas
BS Finance & Accounting 2009
During development for ShowingHero, Zee says he noticed a barrier for entry in technology development for anyone who isn’t a wealthy, successful company like Google. He wanted to give more people the opportunity to learn coding at a young age to lessen that “paywall” and opened the Code Ninjas franchise to make coding a more accessible and less expensive field.
“My education gave me a lot of background in terms of how to prioritize, how to do certain things, how to research, knowing that you don’t have to know the answer to everything, but here’s a framework or a foundation.”
“It’s a paywall to say, ‘No, only Google gets to develop really cool stuff. You guys don’t because you can’t afford it,’” Zee says. “I wanted to get into the tech world and the tech industry, and I was like, ‘This is the most difficult thing in the world.’ It was like a foreign language. At that point in time, it clicked: Like the four years of French I took in high school, if I had taken some coding, I would be more familiar and it wouldn’t seem that foreign or that difficult.”
Zee has used his education in finance and accounting to run three businesses that he says– going into college–he had no idea that he would be pursuing. These fields he finds himself in fit well with an idea he learned at DePaul: We need to be business people. For Zee, that means seeing a void in an industry and figuring out how to fill it.
“How I see it, I like to find: Where is the void? Where is the thing that I feel is unfair or some people have an unfair advantage? How can I fill that?” Zee says. “You can try to find an opportunity, a void in the market somewhere, and be passionate about starting a business.”
