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It’s a familiar story line that’s taken on new urgency in the Black Lives Matter era: that of a lucrative industry characterized by insular hiring patterns and a lack of diversity, while remaining a mystery to many potential hires in its own backyard. 

In the Boston-area commercial real estate development, brokerage and architecture sectors, equity and inclusion efforts have been slow to gain traction despite a decade-long economic expansion and steady job growth. 

“The unfortunate thing is, I still don’t need more than two hands to count brokers of color in Boston,” said Taidgh McClory, a former partner at CBRE who founded a diversity consulting firm in September after 16 years in the local brokerage business. 

Local industry professionals cite several factors for the scarcity of people of color: a tradition of friends-and-family hiring patterns, lack of visibility to potential hires and the reluctance of people of color to relocate to Boston from other parts of the country.  

Firms Falling Short 

Increasingly, local executives acknowledge that the industry’s efforts to foster equity and inclusion are falling short. 

“Fifty years ago, approximately 2 percent of the design profession was made up of Black individuals,” said Alfred Wojciechowski, a principal at Boston-based CBT Architects, citing research from the American Institute of Architects. “Now that number remains exactly the same.” 

CBT – the only one of Boston’s large architecture firms to provide Banker & Tradesman with data on its local staff demographics – has made some strides in recent years creating a workforce that more closely resembles the surrounding region. The firm’s 207-employee Boston workforce is now 72 percent Caucasian, down from 77 percent in 2015, while the share of Asian employees has increased from 14 to 18.5 percent and Black employees from 3 to 4 percent. 

The firm’s involvement in the AIA’s Large Firm Roundtable – a consortium of the nation’s 60 largest design firms – has translated into new recruitment pipelines at historically Black colleges and universities. CBT partnered with Virginia-based Hampton University on paid internships to introduce students to the firm and hired one new graduate originally from the Phoenix area. 

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“What’s really a challenge for young people starting off in the career is: Do they want to move to Boston? It’s a commitment to make a pretty substantial life change,” Wojciechowski said. 

To replicate the success of the Hampton University model, CBT is exploring similar partnerships with local schools such as Bunker Hill Community College and Roxbury Community College, CBT Principal David Nagahiro said. 

Under its first Latina president, Studio Enee Principal Natasha Espada, the Boston Society of Architects had made inclusion and equity a priority before George Floyd’s killing unleashed civil unrest in major cities. The organization is expanding its outreach programs to local schools as low as the primary grades, planning to create a fund to pay for scholarships and training and researching industry-wide data on employee demographics. 

“If we don’t know the numbers, we don’t know the target,” said Espada, who said the timeline for increasing diversity could stretch as far as 2050. 

The local commercial real estate and architecture industries are only just beginning to build the career ladders necessary to grow minority representation at top firms.

Benchmarking Industry Demographics 

A new survey is attempting to verify what’s apparent from industry gatherings and company organizational charts: a lack of diversity ranging from executive suites to rank-and-file employees. On Aug. 12, NAIOP Massachusetts, the commercial real estate development organization, sent out a questionnaire to its 1,700 members asking for information on their age, race and gender. 

After analyzing the results, it’s likely to work with a diversity consultant on new strategies, NAIOP Massachusetts Executive DIrector Reesa Fischer said. 

“We get contacted by our members literally weekly about how they can get it done,” Fischer said. “They’re ready to spend the resources on it, but they need the game plan.” 

One of the industry’s first local outreach efforts to students of color began in 2017. The  

Commercial Real Estate Success Training (CREST), a 10-week summer internship program, matched students with local developers, architects, architects and construction firms. The pandemic reduced participation in this summer’s program from 30 students to 11. NAIOP also is partnering with the Real Estate Executive Council on a virtual internship program at colleges including Massachusetts Institute of Technology for minority students. This summer’s MIT program has 50 student participants and included presentations by local developers including Thomas O’Brien of HYM Investment Group. 

McClory’s Tips When Seeking to Diversify Workforces: 

• Avoid rushing to find talent before your culture is ready to really grow that talent
• Don’t promote or replace employees with a person of color to react to a specific client as a token as opposed to a valuable team member
• The senior ranks hold the keys to the culture. If everybody doesn’t understand the “why” and how it impacts their business and makes the company better, that’s a recipe for disaster

Banker & Tradesman contacted Boston’s largest commercial brokerages seeking data on their workforce diversity numbers in 2020 and 2015. Only one, Cushman & Wakefield, provided specifics: the Boston office currently has 210 employees, of whom 13.8 percent are Black or Asian-American, compared with 97 employees and 8.2 percent in 2015. 

In a statement, Managing Principal and New England Market Leader Carolyn Sidor said the firm has begun forming a diversity team to study its practices and improve outcomes. 

“We will analyze systems within our own company that support or suppress our mission of diversity and inclusion, identifying where we have serious gaps, and creating actionable change to our organization,” Sidor said. 

More Joint Ventures? 

McClory, the former CBRE partner, said he might not have entered the industry if not for the economic downturn of 2001 forcing him to consider a different career path. Even an Ivy League background didn’t put the industry on the Dartmouth College alumnus’ radar screen originally. 

“It’s a closed–loop network of professionals, and that’s why even today the leadership ranks and the major producers are mostly white males, mostly from a handful of the same colleges and very athletically based: a lot of hockey players, a lot of lacrosse players,” he said. 

One way to diversify the talent pool, McClory said, is widening recruitment to other sectors where employees may have translatable skills, such as residential brokerage. 

Steve Adams

“If you have the experience and ability to sell a multi-million-dollar condo downtown, you have the experience to execute a 100,000-square-foot lease transaction,” he said. “There’s no difference in the real estate card they hold. The only difference is the brand. There’s low barriers of entry for that, and I view that as an untapped opportunity.” 

Joint ventures between commercial and residential brokerages could bridge the gap, McClory said, similar to partnerships between architecture firms on development projects that have minority participation requirements. 

“There are some great brokers of color in the Boston area who certainly could partner up with a commercial shop on a site-specific development,” he said.