November 10, 2024 by Jon Banister, Bianca Barragán, Taylor Driscoll, Ryan Wangman, Matt Wasielewski and Emily Wishingrad

CRE’s DEI Drive Faced Setbacks But Achieved Minor Gains Amid 2024's Market Slowdown

This is the fifth annual installment of Bisnow's DEI Data Series, an ongoing investigative project that examines the diversity of the boards and executive leadership of the biggest companies in commercial real estate. Over the years, this award-winning series has amassed a cache of data that continues to shine a spotlight on racial and gender inequality at the highest ranks of the industry. To read the entire series, please click here.

The discussion around real estate’s diversity problem has quieted over the last two years. 

As the industry faced a dramatic slowdown in the market, and as a now-ascendent faction of American politics called for an end to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the push to increase representation at real estate companies seemed to take a back seat. 

According to a new Bisnow investigation, the industry has still made some progress over the last year in adding more people of color and women at its highest levels, but the C-suites at 100 of the largest companies remain more than 85% white and over 70% male.

The investigation looked at the 40 developers and investors with the biggest CRE portfolios plus the 20 REITs with the most assets, the 20 lenders with the largest CRE books and the 20 brokerage firms with the most employees. 

This is the fifth year Bisnow has tracked upper-level diversity in the industry, and the list of companies in the analysis has evolved in order to capture a more complete picture of the largest firms in each sector — a change that will be further detailed in the methodology section below. 

The C-suites of the 100 companies Bisnow investigated this year have 1,195 executives, of which 14.5% are people of color and 27.2% are women. 

The companies have 764 board members that are publicly listed, of which 20.6% are people of color and 31.8% are women. 

Sixty-six of the companies from last year’s sample remained on the list this year, and a comparison of those firms shows that incremental progress has continued over the last 12 months. The percentage of people of color and women in C-suites both increased by half a percentage point. The share of people of color on boards also ticked up a half-point, while the percentage of women on boards increased 1.7 points. 

This is the fourth straight year that has shown upward movement in diversity. Bisnow began tracking the makeup of the industry’s C-suites and boards in 2020, a year when the industry had a reckoning on its racial diversity sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. 

While many real estate firms still have improving diversity as a stated goal, they have encountered more headwinds over the last year in the form of a market slowdown and increased opposition to DEI. 

“We're in this holding pattern,” DEI consultant and former CBRE executive Melina Cordero said. “Because we've had a lot of backlash, and we're also in this sort of purgatory, economic and political. Economically in the cycle, especially for commercial real estate, it's a tough time for a lot of companies, so they're looking at where they can make cuts.” 

Looking at the titles that people of color and women hold in C-suites shows a clear trend. Female executives are much more likely to be in back-office support and personnel roles, such as chief human resources officer or chief marketing officer, than in senior leadership roles like president or chief financial officer. For people of color, however, the breakdown is roughly split between those categories. 

Lenders had the highest diversity of the four sectors in three categories: people of color in C-suites and boards of directors, and women on boards. Brokerages had the highest share of women in their C-suites. 

Brokerage firms had the lowest percentage among all four sectors of people of color in their C-suites. Half of the 20 brokerages Bisnow analyzed had zero people of color on their top executive teams. 

The sector with the least gender representation in its C-suite was REITs, though it had the second-highest gender diversity on boards. Four of the 20 REITs had zero women in their C-suites.

The effects of DEI becoming more politicized are difficult to measure in the data, but New York University Ethics Professor Michael Posner said he has seen a clear shift: Companies that remain focused on increasing diversity are becoming less vocal about it, while others are scaling back their efforts. 

“There’s just a diminished internal commitment,” he said. “Offices that work on diversity issues are being downsized or even eliminated. And it really is a feeling of backsliding in many companies.”

Jump to:
Lenders | Developers and Investors | REITs | Brokerages | Methodology 

Photo: Unsplash/Christina @ wocintechchat.com

Lenders

The lending sector’s relative strength in diversity comes in part because it has shrunk its overall pool of executives. More than half of the lenders Bisnow analyzed cut the size of their C-suite in 2024. The reshuffling gave women and people of color an increase in representation across the halls of power.

The 20 top lenders have 280 executives in their ranks, 28.6% of which are female and 21.4% of which are people of color. While strides are being made toward diversity, representation across top leadership roles still lags far behind the makeup of the U.S. population, which is 50.5% female and 41.6% POC.

The boards of directors for commercial real estate’s biggest lenders are slightly more diverse than their executive suites. Women hold 35.5% of the total 259 board seats and people of color account for 24.3% of membership. 

Fannie Mae was among the top five lenders for all four diversity metrics, while Freddie Mac was in the top for the two racial diversity categories. Citigroup was among the leaders in racial and gender diversity on its C-suite. 

Diana Reid’s appointment as the CEO of Freddie Mac in September and Cathy Marcus joining PGIM as co-CEO in October 2023 boosted the female ranks of CEOs in the lending space to four.  

While these financial institutions work across a range of economic sectors, they all have massive commercial real estate loan books ranging from $17B to $348B, and these C-suite executives and board members are the ultimate decision-makers on those loan deals. 

The types of C-suite roles held by people of color and women at these lending firms show a meaningful difference. People of color have roughly equal representation among senior leaders and back office support and personnel roles. But a wide disparity exists for women: 51 of the 80 women hold back office roles, while 29 hold the role of CEO or other senior leadership positions. 

Developers and Investors

The 40 developers and investors Bisnow analyzed own hundreds of billions of dollars in real estate — and their C-suites are 26% women and 12% people of color. 

Of the board of directors that were publicly available, 17% of members were people of color and 27% were women. 

Most of the developers on the list work exclusively in commercial real estate. The investors assessed cover a range of sectors, but they do invest extensively in commercial real estate and have done so for years. For example, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management company with over $10T in assets under management, including $28B in property.

There was only one female CEO among the 40 companies: Hines co-CEO Laura Hines-Pierce. Only two of the companies are led by people of color, KKR co-CEO Joseph Bae and BGO’s Sonny Kalsi.

BGO publicly set a goal in 2020 to have at least 66.7% of new hires be either women or minorities, and it surpassed its diversity hiring goals for a third year with people of color and women making up 74% of new hires in 2021, 68% in 2022 and 69% in 2023, PERE reported. The firm's six-person leadership team includes four people of color and two women.

At the beginning of the year, Blackstone promoted Nadeem Meghji to Global co-Head of Blackstone Real Estate, bringing the total people of color to four out of its 24 C-suite members. The company also has four female C-suite executives. 

In March, Canadian pension fund CDPQ appointed Rana Ghorayeb as executive vice president and head of real estate, taking over for the firm's CEO, Nathalie Palladitcheff.

Inland Real Estate Investment Corp. has four women in its nine-person C-suite, making it the No. 3 most gender diverse of the 40 developers and investors Bisnow analyzed. Cathleen Hrantek, chief operating officer of the firm's parent company, Inland Real Estate Group, said the firm has several programs meant to create welcoming and inclusive spaces, such as its Women Initiative Network.

"We are constantly trying to improve," she said. "We'd like to see as much diversity as possible in every facet of the company so that we can make sure that we're taking in different opinions, different ways to attack problems so that we can move the company forward."

However, the firm doesn't have a specific mandate to help track its diversity goals.

"I think a lot of times those things are just destined to fail when [you say] okay, we must have 25% of this," Hrantek said. "I think that it's just not how life works." 

REITs

Though people of color and women have been increasingly present over the past few years in the upper echelons of REIT leadership, Bisnow found that neither group is more than one-third represented in boards and C-suites. 

Women are more represented than people of color. Nearly 22% of C-suite positions and nearly one-third of board seats of the 20 REITs Bisnow measured are held by women. People of color hold about 14% of C-suite roles and 23% of board positions. 

Women and people of color differ drastically in what types of roles they hold at these companies. While the 21 people of color in C-suites were roughly evenly divided among back office and leadership roles, the 31 women were overwhelmingly in back office support positions, with only eight in CEO or senior leadership roles. 

Out of the 20 REITs, two had female CEOs and three had CEOs who were people of color.

Four of those CEOs are veterans in their roles — the heads of Ventas, Welltower, Realty Income Corp. and Prologis. The one with a new addition was data center REIT Equinix, which brought on Adaire Fox-Martin as CEO in the second quarter.

Additionally, Equinix in March named a woman of color, Merrie Williamson, as its chief customer and revenue officer, leading the gender diversity in its C-suite to jump from two to four.  

AvalonBay added two women to its C-suite: Alaine Walsh as executive vice president of human capital and administration in January and Pamela Thomas as executive vice president of portfolio and asset management in July.

The company has a goal of having 41% of its senior leadership be women by 2025, but last year it decreased from 38% to 37%, according to its ESG report, which says it is looking to “reignite” its efforts. It did exceed its goal of having 20% underrepresented minorities in its senior leadership roles by 2025.

Prologis’ addition of three new executives at the beginning of the year tripled the number of people of color and doubled the number of women in its C-suite. The logistics giant with $95.9B in total assets — the largest on this list — hired Joseph Ghazal, a person of color, as chief investment officer and Susan Uthayakumar, a woman of color, for a new role of senior adviser. 

The San Francisco-based REIT also announced it will promote two women of color to its top ranks next year as one of its female leaders retires. Effective on Jan. 1, Deborah Briones will be promoted to chief legal officer and Nathaalie Carey to chief human resources officer, replacing Colleen McKeown. 

Photo: Unsplash/Christina @ wocintechchat.com

Brokerages

Brokerages have the lowest percentage of people of color in C-suites of the four CRE sectors Bisnow tracks at just 11.9%. 

At the same time, this sector had the highest percentage of women in its C-suites: 32.2%. The firms with the most gender-diverse C-suites were Cushman & Wakefield, Lee & Associates, Cresa, Savills and SVN. 

Savills added women to leadership positions over the last year, hiring Ruth Fischer as president of Canada, Cally Miltenberger as co-president of Texas and Donna Abood as co-head of Florida. 

Roughly 14% of board members are people of color, while 29% of board members are women.

Of the 29 people of color in brokerages’ C-suites, 16 are back office support and personnel roles, 12 are senior leadership and one is a CEO. Of the 76 women in C-suites, 45 are in back office positions, 30 are senior leadership and one is a CEO. 

Marcus & Millichap’s Hessam Nadji is the only CEO of a brokerage who is a person of color. Cushman & Wakefield’s Michelle MacKay is the only female CEO of a brokerage. 

There were a couple of notable departures of diversity heads this year.

CBRE’s first chief diversity officer, Tim Dismond, left in October of last year and was replaced by Banke Odunaike, who worked as its chief culture officer. Odunaike now serves as global head of legal for CBRE’s Global Workplace Solutions business segment, and the company this year hired Devi Virdi as vice president and global head of DEI. 

Avison Young’s former global director for DEI, Joan Skelton, departed the firm in January, and the company didn’t replace her position.  

Editor’s Note: DEI Data Series Methodology

For this year’s DEI Data Series, Bisnow changed its approach to selecting the list of commercial real estate companies to track, but the process for researching and confirming the racial and gender makeup of C-suites and boards remained the same. 

In the prior four years, the list was a product of editorial decisions about which big firms were most well-known and influential. For this year’s list, Bisnow editors picked the companies based on objective metrics that show the largest firms in each sector: real estate assets under management for the developers/investors segment, total assets for the REIT sector, employee count for the brokerage sector and the size of the CRE loan book for the lenders. 

The developer/investor sector had 40 companies because it had the widest pool — including asset management giants that own big real estate portfolios like Blackstone, global developers like Hines and sector-focused builders like Mill Creek Residential.

The remaining sectors were narrowed down to the 20 largest companies, bringing the total list to an even 100. 

After the list was selected, Bisnow reporters researched company websites and securities filings that list their executives and boards, and looked at publicly available photographs to determine the gender and racial makeup of each individual.

The person-of-color classification was defined using the U.S. Census Bureau’s categories of nonwhite races: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Middle Eastern or North African, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

To understand more about the types of C-suite roles that are becoming more diverse, Bisnow breaks down the executives into three categories: CEOs, senior leadership and back-office executives. The senior leadership category includes those who make decisions over profit-and-loss financial considerations such as presidents, chief financial officers, chief operating officers and executive managing directors who oversee real estate portfolios. The back-office roles are those in non-deal-making positions such as chief accounting officer, chief marketing officer, chief human resources officer and chief diversity officer. 

After gathering the initial data, Bisnow conducts two rounds of outreach to every company on the list, allowing them to confirm or correct their numbers. If a company says a person who was initially counted as white is actually a person of color based on the Census categories, Bisnow defers to that identification. 

The process of identifying thousands of individuals’ gender and race is inherently an imperfect science — which is perhaps why such a limited body of research exists on the commercial real estate industry’s diversity — but Bisnow editors consulted with DEI experts to ensure the process was as rigorous as possible.

Bisnow plans to continue tracking the largest companies in commercial real estate in the years to come and welcomes any feedback on the process. You can reach us at press@bisnow.com. 

Jermaine Frazier-Collins assisted in the data analysis for this report, and Katharine Carlon contributed graphics.

CORRECTION, NOV. 11, 4:25 P.M. ET: A previous version of this story misstated the name of PGIM's new co-CEO. This story has been updated.