Lynda Shillaw described the Lloyds banking job in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crash, as the "most toxic environment I've ever worked in" and recalled, "it was hard, the public hated us, the politicians hated us, the regulator was still trying to work out how it would regulate the industry."
Shillaw was headhunted to lead the real estate lending team at Lloyds in 2010. "They wanted someone with credibility and a rapport with clients. I was a banker who knew what a building site looked like.”
"It was the biggest professional stretch I had made".
Three years in, in late 2013 she had worked out that she didn’t want a career as a Banker and was appointed to head the Property Fund Management Business at, SWIP, which was the UK's fifth-largest real estate fund management business, owned by Lloyds bank.
Seven weeks in she was told the business was being sold. "All I had to pitch to investors was a strategy that I had been developing. I'd inherited something that had been there forever."
Three years ago, Shillaw moved on to her current job, as the divisional chief executive of MAG Property in 2014, an £840m turnover business which runs four airports and a property company.
Shillaw, is a trained accountant who "fell into property by accident" and had overseen the property businesses of BT and The Co-operative estates, before joining SWIP.
"Property is my heroin" she said.