Boston Apartment Owners Reckoning With Long Recovery In Shifting Housing Market

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.

How do you rescue an office project threatened by the coronavirus pandemic? You pivot.

“Before the pandemic, we always used to say, 'We’re doing architecture. It’s really important, but it’s not life or death,'” architect and Sasaki principal Victor Vizgaitis said. “Now, everything you do becomes potentially a question of life or death. How are we meeting? How are we thinking of redesigning?”

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Top brokerage firms spent much of 2020 touting efforts to diversify their overwhelmingly White workforces, but notable shifts at the C-suite level might be overshadowing more impactful measures — particularly at the lower ranks and within pay structures.

Minority real estate professionals who spoke to Bisnow in recent weeks are worried companies are focusing too much on diversifying top positions instead of recruiting a diverse new generation of entry-level brokers. 

That may require modifying the traditional compensation structure, which has long forced new brokers to mostly subsist on commissions earned rather than full salaries.

That’s often a tough sell for working-class recruits, including many minorities, who say the prevailing commission pay structure effectively edges them out of what could be a lucrative brokerage career.

“At the producer level, on the commission sales force, it may not work until they stop the old-school practices,” a Black broker for Colliers International in an East Coast market told Bisnow. “It’s not overtly racist, and I’ve never felt like it was a hostile environment, but it is almost set up for people that come from wealthy families.”

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In Case You Missed It...

The major players in the New York City coworking market have buckled under the stress of the coronavirus pandemic, giving back millions of square feet, needing cash infusions or restructuring.

But Knotel, IWG and WeWork all appear poised to exist in a post-Covid landscape where workplace flexibility is expected to be key. Smaller operators — the backbone of the coworking industry — have a far less certain future. Unlike the giants of the coworking world, these entrepreneurs do not have a cash cushion or an institutional real estate name to break their falls.

Read the full story here.