'It Will Always Be Front Burner For Us': Ken McIntyre On Why CRE Diversity Is So Important

Bisnow's podcast, Make Yourself At Home, hears from members of the commercial real estate industry about how they are managing this new reality and gaining insight into their day-to-day approaches. You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music.

After widespread protests against racial injustice that swept the nation this summer, many in the industry said they stood in solidarity with movements like Black Lives Matter and vowed to put equality front and center.

To get an understanding of where the industry is, Bisnow began looking at the gender and racial diversity at the top levels of the nation’s biggest real estate companies.

The series of stories from this analysis examines REITs, brokerage and commercial real estate finance.

On this episode of the podcast, we hear from Ken McIntyre, the CEO of the Real Estate Executive Council, a trade association for executives of color in commercial real estate. He also sits on the board of Newmark and runs his own consulting firm, PassPort Real Estate. He said that the recruitment of diverse talent across the board should be a focus for the industry, but it should go in tandem with things like supplier diversity, too.

“Talent is one dimension of diversity — but where you spend your money, supplier diversity, vendor diversity, that affects communities, that affects people getting hired, that affects entrepreneurs,” he said. “Those are important aspects on how you can improve your footprint with respect to diversity, equity and inclusion. As you become intentional as to where your money goes — that starts to talk about the equity part and the wealth gap.”