September 2, 2025 by Jon Banister, Bianca Barragán, Taylor Driscoll, Ryan Wangman, Matt Wasielewski and Emily Wishingrad

Pullback From DEI Hasn't Derailed Commercial Real Estate's Slow March Toward Greater Representation

This is the first 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 2 and Part 3 of this year's series, and to read previous years' entries, please click here.

The culture war against diversity, equity and inclusion may be raging in Washington and across corporate America, but it hasn't stopped the steady changes in commercial real estate’s C-suites and boardrooms. Representation at the top keeps inching higher.

Even as the Trump administration wages an all-out assault on DEI and companies have changed their messaging, the substance hasn’t disappeared. Bisnow’s latest deep dive into the 100 biggest CRE firms in America shows the share of women and people of color in leadership roles continues to rise — marking the fifth consecutive year of gains at the industry’s highest levels.

Women now hold 27.5% of C-suite jobs and 32.9% of board seats, up from 27.3% and 31.8% last year. People of color account for 14.8% of C-suites and 20.8% of boardrooms, both higher than a year ago. The gains may be incremental, but they’ve proven stubborn, surviving political blowback and boardroom rebranding alike.

Not all corners of the industry are moving at the same pace. 

The 20 largest brokerages, like CBRE, JLL and Cushman & Wakefield, have put more women in executive chairs than any other sector — 34.9% — but still lag on racial diversity, with only 11.4% of C-suites, lower than last year. Lenders, by contrast, lead on race, with people of color holding 22.1% of top executive roles and nearly a quarter of board seats.

Inside the C-suite, the power divide is clear. Women overwhelmingly occupy back-office roles like HR and marketing — 65% of their positions — while just a third sit in senior leadership. People of color are spread more evenly: 49% in support roles and 47% in senior leadership. Across the 100-company sample, just eight CEOs are people of color and 10 are women.

The industry's highest ranks are still a long way from reflecting the country as a whole. But while companies may have scrubbed “DEI” from their websites and investor materials, the push for greater diversity hasn't disappeared.

“You have the same goals — resilient teams, high-performing investments — then changing a term that you know is a trigger word or a weaponized word but doing the work regardless is a business decision that a lot of organizations have made,” said Mandi Wedin, founder of the CRE Diversity Equity and Inclusion Advisory Board.

Photo: Bisnow

Two of the commercial real estate lending institutions in Bisnow’s analysis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are subject to direct control by the Trump administration, which has fired several of their female executives this year. But the rest of the private sector lending industry added women at the highest levels. 

Federal Housing Finance Agency CEO Bill Pulte in March fired Freddie Mac CEO Diana Reid and replaced her with Mike Hutchins, previously the agency’s president, on an interim basis, reducing the number of women in its executive suite. 

In March, reports emerged that Pulte fired Fannie Mae Chief Compliance and Ethics Officer Nancy Jardini.

Fannie Mae now has three fewer female executives compared to last year, with four women leaving and one joining, Bisnow first reported this week. 

Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Sharifa Anderson, Chief Human Resources Officer Katie O'Connell Jones and Head of Multifamily Michele Evans have also departed this year. The company didn't respond to requests for comment on the nature of their exits. 

While these moves decreased the share of women at Fannie and Freddie, the private lenders in Bisnow's 20-company sample moved in the opposite direction: toward greater diversity. 

Three lenders appointed new female CEOs since November.

The new leaders — Deanna Strable at Principal Financial Group, Christiana Riley at Santander and Gunjan Kedia at U.S. Bancorp — contributed to female representation in lenders’ C-suites increasing 2.4 percentage points to 31.1%. 

Kedia joined two other people of color in the CEO spot across the commercial real estate lending and bank landscape.

The representation of people of color in lenders' C-suites increased modestly from 21.4% last year to 22.1% this year. 

Eighty percent of lenders had some change in the makeup of their board of directors that impacted representation, muddying progress in the last year and leaving board demographics practically unchanged. 

The 20 lender boards analyzed by Bisnow added four seats in the last year for a total of 263. The 93 female board members was one more than in 2024, while the total people of color stayed the same at 63. 

Commercial real estate brokerage firms — which employ thousands of brokers who represent clients in buying, selling, leasing and financing properties — continue to lag behind their industry counterparts in representation of people of color at the highest levels. 

Across the 20 large brokerage firms analyzed by Bisnow, people of color held 11.4% of C-suite roles, down from 12.3% last year. 

By contrast, the share of women in these C-suites rose from 32.2% last year to 34.9% this year. 

The firms with the highest proportion of women in their C-suites were Cushman & Wakefield, Lee & Associates, Cresa, Savills and SVN. The most racially diverse C-suites were CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Avison Young, Marcus & Millichap, Berkadia and SVN.

Of the 26 people of color in these brokerages’ C-suites, one is a CEO: Marcus & Millichap’s Hessam Nadji. The sector also has one female CEO: Cushman & Wakefield’s Michelle MacKay.

Several of the firms don’t publicly disclose their board members, but of the ones that do, there are 149 members, 47 of whom are women and 22 of whom are people of color. 

The racial reckoning in 2020 led many brokerages to hire heads of diversity, tout commitments to DEI programs and pledge to increase representation in their ranks. 

“We’ve really been focused on having diversity and inclusion as objectives, but change in our company and the industry is not something that will happen quickly,” Avison Young Chief Operating Officer Martin Dockrill told Bisnow in 2020.

Avison Young has three people of color and five women in its 12-person C-suite, but the firm no longer has an executive dedicated to DEI. Its former global director for DEI, Joan Skelton, left the firm in December 2023, and the company hasn't hired a replacement.

An Avison Young spokesperson said the company's DEI initiatives, including employee resource groups, remain in place and have been managed since Skelton's departure by Chief Human Resources Officer Pam Mazza.

“Placing DEI initiatives and programs under the leadership of Human Resources ensures they are deeply embedded into Avison Young’s culture and employee experience — connecting diversity and inclusion with recruitment, talent development and employee engagement,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. 

Other chief diversity officers have left their jobs or shifted roles within their organizations over the past two years.

CBRE’s first chief diversity officer, Tim Dismond, left in October 2023 and was replaced by Banke Odunaike, who worked as its chief culture officer until June 2024, when she switched roles. The company in April 2024 hired Devi Virdi as global head of diversity, equity and inclusion, but she left the firm in December. 

Amid the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI, several brokerages this year have changed the titles of their heads of diversity while keeping those people on staff. At least eight firms previously had heads of diversity, but now, none of the 20 brokerages Bisnow analyzed this year have an executive with the title of DEI head. 

Cushman & Wakefield’s Nadine Augusta, previously chief DEI officer, is now the company’s chief impact officer. Greystone’s Pranika Uppal Sinha’s title changed from managing director of DEI and organizational development to managing director of organizational development and culture. 

JLL’s Nashunda Williams, who as of November was the company’s global head of DEI, is now its head of culture and employee experience.

Executive-level diversity at the 40 development and investment firms Bisnow tracks remained relatively unchanged from 2024. These companies include top real estate developers like Hines, Related Cos., Tishman Speyer and Greystar as well as investment giants like BlackRock, KKR & Co., TPG and Ivanhoé Cambridge.

People of color made up 12.6% of the companies’ C-suites this year, up half a percentage point from last year. Gender representation fell, with women making up just under 25% of C-suites, down from 25.9% last year. 

Of the 40 companies, only 13 listed their board of directors publicly. Nearly 28% of the members of those boards are female and 18% are people of color, both representing slight upticks from last year. 

Of the 76 people of color in the C-suites examined, two were CEOs.

Hines was the lone company with a female CEO, co-CEO Laura Hines-Pierce, while BGO and KKR are led by people of color: Sonny Kalsi and Joseph Bae.

Executive shake-ups and company restructurings this year have impacted the sector’s diversity numbers.

In February, JPI Chief Visionary Officer Scott Turner was confirmed as the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His departure left JPI’s C-suite without a person of color.  

In May, Inland Real Estate Investment appointed Catherine Lynch as chairperson following the resignation of the former chair, Robert D. Parks. The company also hired Nati Kiferbaum as chief strategy officer and Rahul Sehgal as chief operating officer in January.

Also in January, AEW Capital Management hired Lauren Holden as its head of retail.

Ivanhoé Cambridge was restructured and rebranded to La Caisse. Because of the consolidation, La Caisse’s C-suite grew from four to 12 members — but it only added one woman and zero people of color. 

At the beginning of the year, the largest investment firm in the country, BlackRock, quietly distanced itself from diversity initiatives and dropped references of diversity, equity and inclusion from its annual report. The moves came after the company’s executive team publicly championed diversity efforts four years earlier. 

“Just as we ask of other companies, we have a long-term strategy aimed at improving diversity, equity and inclusion at BlackRock,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote in a 2021 letter to shareholders. “To truly drive change, we must embed DEI into everything we do.”

The 20 publicly traded REITs Bisnow analyzed — including some of the world’s largest real estate owners, like industrial giant Prologis, life sciences leader Alexandria Real Estate Equities and data center giant Equinix — had marginal movement among their top ranks of influence. 

The representation of people of color in REITs' C-suites experienced the biggest gains this year, rising to 16% from 14.4% last year. The share of people of color on these companies’ boards remained around 23%. 

Gender diversity on boards increased by 1.5 percentage points, with women this year holding 70 of the 204 board seats across the 20 REITs. Female representation in the C-suites of these same REITs, however, declined by 1.9 points to 20%. 

Representation among the REITs’ CEOs stayed the same, with two female CEOs and three people of color. But the CEO at industrial real estate giant Prologis, Hamid Moghadam, is set to retire at the end of the year and be replaced by longtime executive Dan Letter, a white man. 

Healthpeak Properties added both a woman and a person of color to its C-suite over the past nine months. Kelvin Moses, a black man, was promoted to chief financial officer in April. He replaced Peter Scott, a white man who resigned to join another healthcare REIT. 

The company also promoted Tracy Porter to executive vice president and general counsel in March. She replaced Jeffrey Miller, also a white man, who had been with the company since 2018.

Multiple REITs added women to their boards, some replacing departing female board members and others adding net new female members. BXP, Invitation Homes and Alexandria Real Estate Equities added women to replace women who departed, while Prologis and Kimco Realty added net new female board members. Two REITs lost women from their boards: Realty Income Corp. and Welltower.

Equinix, the largest data center REIT, with a $76B market capitalization, continues to have diverse representation in the C-suite. 

Out of 12 C-suite leaders, five are people of color and four are women, including its CEO. The REIT added Harmeen Mehta, a woman of color, as chief digital and innovation officer, a new role, this year.

Equinix did lose two people of color in its C-suite. Merrie Williamson, who served as chief customer and revenue officer, left in February, according to her LinkedIn profile, after being with the company for only a year. And Milind Wagle, who had been chief information officer since 2016, left in March.

The Redwood City, California-based company declined to comment on its diversity strategy. Its website today doesn’t mention DEI but has an Inclusion and Belonging section. It lists several employee groups, including ones for Black, Asian and female employees, and it highlights “the significance of diverse voices in decision-making.”

“Inclusion requires a deliberate effort to break down barriers and ensure that every voice is heard, recognizing that a multitude of perspectives strengthens our business,” Equinix’s website says.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, which will examine how CRE firms have changed their messaging around DEI, and Part 3, which will explore how DEI-focused professionals in the industry are adapting their strategies.