This article is the second in a two-part series exploring attempts to improve opportunities for women and minorities in the local commercial real estate industry.
Talk at women’s networking events frequently turns to advances and setbacks by females in the commercial real estate industry and how to close significant but shrinking gaps in pay compared to their male colleagues.
Echoing critiques about a lack of racial diversity in the industry, executives say more aggressive leadership by male executives and outreach to college and high school students is important to overcome the industry’s lingering gender gap.
“I don’t think it’s an overt discrimination thing,” said Cara Nelson, a partner at law firm DLA Piper in Boston and 2017 president of Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Boston. “It may be an unconscious bias. Part of the issue is women talk to each other a lot about these things, but this doesn’t change unless we engage men in the conversation.”
Two recent studies spotlight women’s progress in the industry as well as a lingering wage gap among female workers in Greater Boston.
Some 69 companies from a wide array of industries submitted confidential wage data from 112,600 employees to the Boston Women’s Workforce Council as part of its first-ever 100% Talent Compact. The report found a 23-cent-per-dollar wage gap, with men’s average salary of $103,155 and women trailing at $78,954.
JLL Boston was the only local commercial brokerage to participate in the report. Jim Tierney, New England market director for JLL, said the industry’s large number of commissioned employees and variety of compensation models makes comparisons difficult.
“We have to dig down into the details,” Tierney said, who declined to share JLL’s salary data. “I think we are a leader in the industry in this way. A number of the metrics that we look at, though, there’s always room for improvement.”
Among JLL’s roughly 70,000 global employees, women comprise 35 percent, including 39 percent of leadership positions, Tierney noted.
“We’ve got a long way to go and there is no silver bullet here,” he said. “It’s going to take a concerted effort at recruitment and providing opportunities for a more diverse workforce.”
The national CREW Network has since 2005 charted workforce representation and wage gaps in the commercial real estate industry. The most recent survey in 2015 found a wage gap of 23.3 percent, with men earning median total compensation of $150,000 and women trailing at $115,000. Women still work primarily in salaried positions, the report found.
Kristin Blount, an executive vice president at Colliers International in Boston, interned at the firm then known as Meredith & Grew during college and accepted a position there after graduating from Boston College in 1986.
At the time, there were no female brokers at the company and the outgoing CEO, George Lovejoy, recommended Blount join the property management team. When she was 30, Blount went back to school and obtained her master’s in real estate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her parents had background in development and residential sales, and she wanted to switch to the brokerage side of the business.
“The actual deal part is more fun to me, being on the front lines,” she said.
Blount credits current Colliers CEO Thomas Hynes with recognizing her potential and offering a three-year opportunity to work on salary and bonus while building up a book of business and switching to commission.
Hynes’ sponsorship was critical to Blount’s advancement, she said, referring to behind-the-scenes advocacy, such as nominating her for industry awards.
Such support by male colleagues is critical, said Nelson, the CREW president, who penned an open letter to the industry last month published in the New England Real Estate Journal.
“We need the men who are leading most of the commercial real estate firms to notice when there are no women in the room, at the table, or on the panel,” Nelson wrote. “We need men to make it clear that diversity in their firms – at all levels – and on their deals and in the commercial real estate community as a whole is not just desirable, but necessary. We need our male colleagues to stand up and work with us. This is a call to action.”
Broadening Recruitment Strategies
Laying the groundwork for the next generation of female developers and brokers begins with more aggressive outreach to colleges and universities, said Barbara Elia, a 20-year industry veteran and executive managing director at Cushman and Wakefield in Boston.
“The network is a little bit of a closed network in terms of entry-level or breaking into the business,” Elia said. “It’s hard to know what jobs are out there, what companies are hiring. We get a lot of people from the traditional NESCAC schools. If you were a lacrosse player at XYZ College and someone calls you and you see yourself in that person, you tend to hire that person.”
Over the past decade, CBRE/New England has broadened its college outreach to recruit its crop of 20 summer interns, said Erin Walls, a partner and human resources executive.
“Females are cold-calling me and reaching out due to the exposure they’ve had in college to know that commercial real estate is an industry they would excel in,” Walls said. “It’s refreshing.”
Gender diversity is more prevalent in the industry’s nonprofit sector, said Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, CEO of Boston-based Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA). More than three-fourths of IBA’s staff are female and approximately 84 percent are minorities.
Calderón-Rosado credits her background in finance and community development as helping her make the transition to real estate 14 years ago. But emotional intelligence is a critical part of development, an area where females and minorities may have an advantage.
“You have to work with communities,” she said. “Any project, before you break ground, you have to get out there and sell the idea and relate to people from different backgrounds. Those are things that people sometimes take for granted.”
