Diversity in CRE

Agree. White old dudes all around.

This is a pretty competitive industry, especially when it comes to brokerage. They are choosing people based on their merits and ability to win and close business. - Sincerely your fellow CRE Indian.  

I think the reason is simple and it ties back to the question everyone is always asking....how do I explain to people what I do for work? Point is that the amount of people in the country that even understand there are careers within CRE and it's not just Trump and a bunch of other rich guys driving their rents up is almost 0.  That means that the people going in to real estate tend to either have come from families that were also in RE or somehow fell into it via their college's business school offering a real estate program or they came from wealthy suburbs where they saw their friends parents doing it. It goes without saying why there were historically no people of color or women in real estate, but the reason it's slow to improve is probably just that many people of color and women don't even know the career path exists. 

Our firm makes an effort to look for these candidates and we really don't get that many resumes that aren't white guys. It's not as if we are purposely hiring white guys, but that there are just way more of them applying to positions than people of color or women. 

Become an owner/operator/developer so that Brad from JLL or Chad from CBRE will compete for your business. What other satisfaction can be greater than that. Yes it’s easier said than done, but dont get disheartened, instead use it as fuel and work towards your goals. Start from the bottom, be smart but take risks and once you are an owner/operator/developer, the Brads and Chads will dance to your tunes. 

Because real estate, and especially brokerage, is extremely network-dependent.  Which is why in NYC so many brokers come from Orthodox Jewish backgrounds - one of the largest ethno-religious groups of real estate owners is Jewish.  They give business to people in their community.  Because being a broker doesn't require anything in the way of special intelligence or knowledge, hires are generally made within the same community network.  

That being said, there are plenty of diversity initiatives in real estate, and plenty of pre-existing diversity, so acting like your 15 seconds of Googling is somehow representative of anything is extremely disingenuous.

Also, brokerage is a tiny part of CRE, so your already too-small sample size is even more meaningless.

Until the last 10-15 years, Commercial Real Estate was not an institutionalized and well known industry. In a lot of ways, even now, it isn't understood let alone on the forefront of people's minds. Type A, intelligent kids want to be engineers, lawyers, doctors, or CEOs, and unsurprisingly, college and then law school, med school, or business school are the socially familiar ways of "making it." People don't grow up wanting to get into this industry. Traditionally, they got into this industry because their dad was in this industry. 

I think it's a little bit of everything.....I think it's family ties/community ties. As others have said, a brokerage in NYC is heavily orthodox, and they work with many from their community. Therefore, it just propagates. They trust the person, and since the spreads will be the same, they work with that person. Then, many on the IS side and Originations have family legacies. Many owner-operators have family ties and go into the family business. Any of the women I know, their father or mother, were also in the industry. Most of our interns are friends of the Execs kids and whatnot. There are not many women candidates. Now POC, I think, doesn't really go into the programs; around the mid-Atlantic, there are a couple of big wealth advisors and MDLBs that recruit heavily from the HBCUs that have really good business schools. I know when hiring, we don't look at any demographic of who we hire; it's typically someone who knows someone from school or a prior employer and brings them over when hiring. Now, if you look at the Federal side of CRE, mainly in MF, you have a large, diverse population at Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, FHFA, and HUD. Lots of diversity of GC at almost any corporate or CRE-specific law firm. So it's mainly who goes into CRE, it seems, since it seems supporting industries have plenty of diversity. 

The only diversity needed are the smokeshow white and Latina chicks on selling sunset

All the above basically says nepotism

Because qualified diversity candidates dont want to do sales when they can do a number of other things.

If your company is part of REEC, that is a great program for POC

The industry has gotten more diverse over the past 15 - 20 years.  When I was first starting out, I did feel somewhat like a minority person, as I was the only one.  I felt I had to prove myself not just for me but also those who would come after me.  Also, building a deep relationship with people not from your home culture, it didn’t come as naturally as say with people with a lot of commonalities.  But I’ve learned to be a curious person, with many interests, travel experiences, and open mindedness.  I remember going to an exclusive industry conference in Dallas of institutional level CEO’s and partners and there were 5 people of color amongst 200 attendees.  One of the people who looked like me (except way older) was a respected real estate developer.  So I asked him, how did you do it?  This is what he wrote me (below).
 

The part about learning your craft, embracing who you are, having fun, learning to play the game, and sharing with and mentoring others, really stuck with me.  Earlier in my career, I would share this email with my close friends who just needed a pep talk.  I hope you take the ball and run with it - and pay it forward.
 

Young people today have very little guidance in terms of being taken
"under the wings of".  In the office and in business there are many
smart people.  But smart people do not equate to wise people and often
they cannot distill how they got to where they are.  More often than
not, they are unwilling to share. Unfortunately our parents who love us
very much often have some generational gap or in our cases enough of a
cultural gap that they cannot readily help us on a job and career basis
either.  But love them for they gave us the opportunity.

We are unique for we are multicultural!  We have the extra burden of
dealing with our race and culture which is far different from being
vanilla American, and then we also have to assimilate well in the
business world that we operate in.  

Then we have to deal with how to excel in those circumstances.  We must
not and cannot afford the business world to slot us because we are "Asian" as some mathematical or financial nerd.  

When people look at me business wise, I have been able to demonstrate
excellence in Finance, Construction, Marketing, Design, Management,
Legal, and many other business facets.  I worked at that to get there.

When they deal with me as a person, they see a fun outgoing gregarious
person with lots of interests and commonalities.  I worked at that to get there.

So be purposeful, have fun, be inquisitive, and excel beyond your comfort zone.  We all like what we are familiar with.  But that is never good enough.  Try and attack the areas that you would think of last to work on.  Chances are they are the most important areas you need to hone.  And any work on new areas requires time, effort and some pain.
You do not gain without some sacrifice.  It is well worth it at the end.

Then when you have evolved and learned to master some ways of living and
working, go out and share it with some others for many too have no mentors.  Make a difference!