CRE's Diversity Leaders Are Still Doing The Work. They're Just Not Calling It 'DEI'
This is the third part of the sixth 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. This year, the project explores the changing political landscape around DEI and uncovers new revelations about how the industry is shifting its approach. Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this year's series, and click here to read previous years' entries.
When Dave Madan founded the Boston-based Builders of Color Coalition in 2017, its mission was to support people of color in real estate, a predominantly white and male industry.
Madan, who is Indian American, stepped down from the helm of the organization two years ago. He returned to lead the coalition earlier this year — with the political winds around diversity initiatives having shifted dramatically — and decided to rebrand it to The Builder Coalition.
Along with removing “of color” from the name, he said he broadened its focus and mission in an effort to be more inclusive, targeting not only people of color but anyone in the industry from a marginalized background.
“Look, one's background racially does have implications on somebody's outcomes in life, but at the end of the day, the point is that, on a broader basis, there's just a lot of people who structurally are not having access to the same opportunities,” Madan said.
His is one of several organizations that have made it their mission to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in commercial real estate — a movement that gained traction after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests but this year has become a target of the Trump administration.
With CRE companies now largely distancing themselves from DEI, these organizations are changing their approach. Some are reframing their work by using less hot-button language but maintaining the same mission, while others are shifting their strategy and broadening the scope of their mission to include more than just diversity.
The impact of the industry’s changing approach to diversity may not be apparent for some time, as other macroeconomic factors have contributed to an overall slowdown in CRE hiring activity, DEI-related or otherwise.
Among the consultants and nonprofit leaders who spoke with Bisnow for this story, there was broad agreement that one of the industry's top buzzwords of the last five years — DEI — has now become a dirty word.
“We're renaming things. We're putting it under culture or under environmental, social governance, ESG,” said workplace consultant Garland Fuller, who has more than a decade of experience working in CRE talent acquisition, including time at CBRE recruiting diverse talent. “But we're not using DEI anymore because it's now considered a third-rail term. It electrifies things.”
Though the first tremors in the corporate DEI world came in 2023 when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in school admissions, this year’s pivots and semantic shifts have largely been spurred by the Trump administration’s targeting of DEI as discriminatory and illegal.
Those efforts began with a January executive order aimed at ending “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’” in the federal government. More recently, guidance issued July 29 by Attorney General Pam Bondi gave a detailed list of DEI policies that the Department of Justice considers unlawful and directed public and private employers to review their practices for compliance.
Many organizations and practitioners working in what would have been called the DEI space are now curtailing certain words and phrases in favor of other terms that aren’t quite so loaded. For some, the outgoing terminology wasn’t hard to let go.
Madan’s newly rebranded coalition has always had members from a wide variety of backgrounds, but the majority of membership has traditionally been Black men and women, Madan said.
The new name and expanded focus are still in line with the organization's main thrust, which is that there are many potential developers out there whose talent isn’t being recognized.
“It’s always been a broader coalition, and we’re just being really clear about that,” Madan said.
The commercial real estate industry has long been and remains a predominantly white and male industry, especially at the highest levels. This month, Bisnow’s annual investigation found that the C-suites of 100 of the largest CRE companies are 27.5% women and 14.8% people of color.
Project REAP, a 28-year-old organization that works to combat the industry’s lack of diversity by working with developers to create apprenticeships for minority prospects, never called what it was doing “DEI” until after 2020, Executive Director Taneshia Nash Laird said.
“I did not consider what we do DEI,” she said. “I always thought of it as bringing untapped talent into the commercial real estate space.”
But then the widespread protests to address racial inequality prompted companies across industries to make sweeping promises and commit millions of dollars. Project REAP’s 2023 impact report said: “Since its founding, REAP has sought to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the commercial real estate (CRE) industry through education, mentorship, networking, and industry partnerships.”
Nash Laird said the acronym is now “polarizing language” and references to the term have been taken out of the organization’s messaging.
“As it stands, we just want to continue the mission of supporting the talent and development pipeline,” she said.
Individual consultants working in the field of helping women and CRE workers of color have changed their business strategies, not just their words.
When former CBRE executive Melina Cordero struck out to start her own consultancy in 2021, her focus was squarely on DEI. But even then, she saw “a lot of reluctance and hesitation and discomfort” around the topic.
“Commercial real estate was just not ready for it,” Cordero said.
Because of that revelation, Cordero had already adjusted her language by the time the anti-DEI forces collided with CRE this year, and she discusses her work as “leadership development.”
Although she doesn’t limit her services to any one group, most of the leadership development work she has done is with women and women of color in CRE — something she sees as aligned with her original 2021 goals for her business.
“That's the way that I frame my work: I do leadership development for anybody who believes in great leadership,” Cordero said.
Some CRE professionals said that the evolving language around inclusion is just part of a process that began before 2020 and will continue into the future.
“It wasn't called DEI before,” Fuller said. “It was called organizational development work or organizational psychology work or workplace consulting, maybe, but it wasn't DEI. With anything, you need to keep up with the culture.”
The Commercial Real Estate Women Network is a rare organization among those that spoke with Bisnow, in that it isn't altering language around its mission to uplift women in the industry and doesn’t plan to, CEO Alison Beddard told Bisnow.
The CREW Network focuses on promoting women in commercial real estate, offering them leadership opportunities and producing research on the advancement of women in the industry. It has invoked the term DEI in relation to its work and even has a page on its website called “Our Commitment to DEI.”
Beddard said approximately half of the women who participated in CREW Network leadership development programs, conventions and other events this year received financial support from their companies. That number has remained steadily in the 45% to 50% range in the last few years that CREW has tracked the metric, according to CREW data.
“I look at that as a very positive sign and a tangible sign of companies' continued commitments to women's professional development and career advancement,” Beddard said.
While gender diversity still seems to be a safe thing to promote, Project REAP's Nash Laird said language around racial diversity has become more controversial this year.
“What's unfortunate is that what I had started to see early this year is that anything that has to do with people of color was painted with this unfortunate brush that somehow inherently you are not equal or talented,” she said. “And obviously, that's offensive to me.”
Kelani Blackwell, who founded the Women In Real Estate group in 2021 with a focus on helping women of color launch careers in the industry, said she has pivoted her strategy. Rather than trying to place women in big brokerage firms, which often want experienced brokers with a book of business, she has focused on smaller, boutique brokerages and development firms.
She said she has also seen a shift in how the brokers she works with talk about diversity with prospective clients.
“I have seen it on the client-facing front, where producers are making sure that their language and their presence and content isn't offending someone who agrees with the side of the negative implications of DEI,” she said.
“I’ve literally seen someone take out the word ‘diversity’ as a value-add proposition for their team,” she added. “What was looked at as a value-add they are fearful would cause them to lose business.”
As the industry's messaging and missions have shifted in response to the changing political landscape, diversity advocates looking back on the DEI push that began in 2020 find it hard to evaluate the success.
Many companies previously touted their DEI initiatives, but they didn't consistently track their progress, said Collete English Dixon, executive director of the Marshall Bennett Institute of Real Estate at Roosevelt University.
“You don’t change what you don’t measure,” English Dixon said.
“The idea of [companies] saying, ‘We're not doing these programs anymore, we're not going to say we have a diversity, equity and inclusion committee’ or all that can often lead to people kind of going, ‘So what are you doing?’”
It is also proving challenging to gauge the impact of the rollback of DEI commitments on the CRE talent pipeline this year because hiring has been slow in the industry, especially at the entry level, due to macroeconomic uncertainty.
In the first half of 2025, CRE job platform SelectLeaders’ postings for entry-level CRE roles, defined as those requiring zero to two years of experience, stood 19% below their 2021 peak, Bisnow previously reported.
When hiring is slower, companies are more hesitant to take risks and more likely to rely on personal connections rather than open postings, Andy Hunt, executive director of the Vieth Institute for Real Estate Leadership at Marquette University, told Bisnow in July.
English Dixon said that, looking ahead, it will require organizations and practitioners who really believe in the value of diversity, equity and inclusion to find ways to keep the ideas alive through a rough economy and whatever other obstacles may come.
“In order to keep us from going totally backwards, it's going to take all of us who still believe how important this is to continue to talk about it, to continue to voice our concerns, to do what we can to push back against the efforts to eliminate and undermine those values and the progress that we've made,” English Dixon said.
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