As Firms Tiptoe Back To Offices, Will CRE See Start Of Rehiring Spree?

In this series, Bisnow highlights people and companies pushing the commercial real estate industry forward in myriad ways. Click here to read Q&As with all the Innovators Bisnow has interviewed so far.

In order for innovation to matter, the idea needs to be followed by doing the work. 

The coworking sphere has particularly come under fire for being consumed by the idea of work rather than its practical application. And the entire real estate industry has been under unprecedented scrutiny over the last year for how relatively few companies are doing the work of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Shervonne Cherry is no stranger to doing the work in any sense, and she is working to tackle problems both in coworking and in diversity and equity in real estate. She has lived the startup life, having started her tech career at Mindgrub as one of five employees in her CEO’s basement. She later served as program director for DreamIt Health, overseeing a 16-week accelerator program in a proto-coworking space within a Cordish Cos. office building in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor neighborhood.

When Cordish repurposed the space to become the first location of its coworking subsidiary Spark, “Lo and behold, I was already there,” as Cherry put it. Granted free rein by the developer’s leadership, Cherry set about building a coworking space reflective of its home city: proud of its roots, painfully aware of its disadvantages and invested in success on a collective level, not scraping and clawing to get ahead of whoever is nearby.

Read the full story here.

As a cost- and time-saving technique, modular construction has long had a great future ahead of it. Arguably, it still does, with off-site manufacturing of essential building components a useful strategy for some projects in a time of projected construction labor shortages and higher material costs.

Yet obstacles remain. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, modular construction suffered from lingering and generally outdated recollections of cheap prefab components or the early days of the mobile home industry, according to builders who use the technique effectively. Then the pandemic hit, knocking the construction industry for a loop, and with it modular construction, especially its use for building hotels.

"There's still somewhat of a stigma to it. People hear modular or off-site construction and they instantly think 'mobile home,' which is kind of funny, considering that we use modular construction to build very high-end luxury townhomes," Resolute Capital Partners Managing Director Candace Powell said. Modular construction is used in…

Read Full Story

In Case You Missed It...