The German-Turkish entrepreneur Zeynep Dogrucan bought her first house when she was just 17 years old. Many other investment properties were to follow. Zeynep Dogrucan / Getty Images / ah_fotobox / Business Insider
Zeynep Dogrucan grew up as the grandchild of Turkish migrant workers in the small town of Hemsbach in Baden-Württemberg.
She was interested in real estate as a teenager. At 17 she bought a three-family house. At the age of 40, she founded the Forum group of companies together with her brother. The company now has seven-figure sales.
As a young woman, after training and additional studies, she pursued a career as a banker and quickly rose to become a manager. When she was just 17, Dogrucan bought her first property, and countless more were to follow. Read here how she and her brother achieved this.
“My grandparents came to Germany in 1955, we were among the first guest workers,” begins Zeynep Dogrucan. The German-Turkish woman, born in 1976 in Weinheim, Baden-Württemberg, founded the Forum group of companies with her brother Ömer Mert in 2016. The Dogrucan family began in Hemsbach in Baden-Württemberg. Her grandparents came to the small town in 1955 as so-called guest workers and worked there as factory workers.
Dogrucan describes her childhood in Hemsbach as sheltered. The family lived in a predominantly German neighborhood. According to Dogrucan, her family arrived in mainstream German society early on. So their parents encouraged the three children to buy real estate in Germany and not just in Turkey. Unlike other Turkish guest workers at the time, their parents did not plan to return to Turkey. Dogrucan’s father, Mustafa Mert, worked as a factory worker and her mother looked after the family as a housewife. Even if their parents didn’t speak German well, they supported their children as best they could with their homework and were committed to their educational advancement. Dogrucan describes her sheltered childhood and her liberal parents and grandparents as the guarantee of her success.