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As of September 2026, Sonja Bosch works in leasing in Abu Dhabi and is moving toward resale. This profile is built from her own account, given to Gulf Times Now in writing.
Most people who change careers do it early, while the cost of being wrong is still small. Sonja Bosch did it after a full working life in the medical field, with three sons to support and, in her own description, not in a good place financially.
She is direct about what carried her through it, and it was not confidence. “I did not have a choice; I could not let them down.”
What did she do before property?
She spent her career in the medical field. She describes the job she left as a highly responsible position in a career she loved, and she is careful to say she loved it. What she wanted was a break from rigid workplace restrictions, not an escape from the work itself.
Real estate had been sitting at the back of her mind for years. In her words, it was always there, but life does not always take you straight to a thing.
How did she get in?
By asking. She describes herself as inquisitive, someone who likes to find things out, and she approached a person already working in real estate simply to talk about it. He introduced her to a close friend who had started his own company and needed help acquiring customers and building solid relationships with clients.
That is the whole entry route. No qualification, no course, no waiting for the right moment. One conversation with someone who was already doing the job, and then a second conversation with the person who could hire her.
What was actually hard about it?
Not the market. Self-belief.
She names it plainly as the biggest challenge of starting out. She had worked in the medical field all her life, so the move was a complete change of career, and the people around her said as much. She adds a line about her own age that most people would edit out of a professional profile and she did not: she is not twenty years old any more.
Underneath that sat the practical arithmetic. Three children to support and no financial cushion, at the point in a career change when income is least predictable.
What does she say got her through?
Her sons, and she is specific that they believed in her rather than merely tolerated the decision. She lists them first, ahead of anything about the market or her own ability, when asked about her biggest achievement.
What she counts as that achievement is worth reading closely. Not a sale, not a figure, not a title. She describes it as overcoming the restrictions placed in her way financially and emotionally, and she says she never doubted she would be successful, because the people close to her had backed her.
Then the line she keeps returning to. She did not have a choice, and she could not let them down.
What is she working on now?
Leasing, which she started recently, and she is honest that it is a slow start financially. She took it deliberately: leasing clients have urgent needs, urgency means volume, and volume means she is learning Abu Dhabi first-hand rather than from a portal.
Day to day that means dealing with tenants, owners and other agents to get the best deal for whoever she is acting for. Resale is the next step.
Anyone renting in the emirate for the first time will recognise the terrain she is describing. It is worth understanding how the Abu Dhabi rent cap and the main areas actually work before you sit down with any agent, and Tawtheeq registration is the step that makes a tenancy real. If buying is the goal instead, freehold ownership and the DARI system are the starting point.
What has she learned that she did not expect?
That success takes time, which sounds like a platitude until you see what she does with it.
She turns it outward. Her point is not that patience makes you money eventually. It is that patience makes you useful to the people around you who feel they have failed because a property did not sell in the first week, or the first six months. In an industry that measures people monthly, that is an unusual thing for a new agent to build her practice on.
She frames it as character rather than technique, and adds that it is what lets you work and coordinate with others.
What does she want to be known for?
Her answer names three things, and only one of them is competence: character, stamina and humour. She wants to be one of the best property consultants in the country, and she wants the client to come away believing there are people willing to work hard on their behalf, whether they are investing or buying somewhere to live.
On the emirate itself she is unguarded. She says the UAE has been good to her, credits the support of the country’s leadership, and calls it a privilege to feel she is helping build Abu Dhabi. That view is easier to understand alongside the numbers: Abu Dhabi’s property market has been outperforming Dubai’s, which is the market she chose to start in.
What would she tell someone starting now?
Four things, and they are unusually unsentimental for advice offered to one’s younger self.
Find a mentor. Believe you know nothing, and absorb as much as you can. Be willing to put in the work. And do not focus on your own rewards until the client has theirs.
That last one is the tell. It is the same instinct that made her count her achievement in obligations met rather than deals closed.
What is the short version?
Sonja Bosch left a long career in the medical field for Abu Dhabi property after a single conversation, with three sons to support and no financial cushion. She names self-belief, not the market, as the hardest part, and credits her sons for the fact she got past it. She works in leasing now, chose it deliberately because urgent clients teach the city fastest, and is heading toward resale. Her working principle is that success takes time, and her advice is to find a mentor, assume you know nothing, and put the client’s reward ahead of your own.
She posts as @abudhabisonja, the account she gives as her own.
Quotations and biographical detail are Sonja Bosch’s own, submitted to Gulf Times Now in writing on 26 August 2026 and reproduced with her punctuation. Gulf Times Now names no employer or credential here that she did not name herself. Abu Dhabi tenancy and real-estate services referenced in this article are administered by the Department of Municipalities and Transport.
Last updated: 6 September 2026.
