Women occupy more C-suite offices at Denver commercial real estate firms than they have in decades past, and many of them credit their mentors, tenacity and sense of urgency for their rise.

Overall, women hold about 10% of executive-level positions at American commercial real estate companies and about one-quarter of senior leadership roles, according to research from the CREW Network. But, some of Denver’s top women executives said during Bisnow’s Denver Women Leading Real Estate event at Dairy Block’s Venture X coworking space on July 27 that there is still a lot of work to be done.

Mortenson Senior Vice President Maja Rosenquist said she is “not at all happy” with the representation of women in construction leadership roles, and added that the industry’s “low bar for success” is part of the problem. For instance, she pointed to the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs’ requirement that women make up only 6.9% of work hours for contractors on federal job sites.

Rosenquist added women are also still more likely to fill administrative roles rather than trade jobs at construction companies despite the efforts of many firms to increase the number of women on job sites.

“It’s one thing to look at your diversity numbers at a holistic level, but it’s a completely different thing to think about what roles women play on your company’s job site,” Rosenquist said.

Increasing representation of women in the commercial real estate industry has been one of Rosenquist’s goals for many years. She was one of the 21 women honored at the event, which celebrated women across the industry.

SynEnergy LLC CEO Mina McCullom said mentorship was one of the keys to her success when she worked at Fortune 50 companies like Boeing. However, she added that there need to be more mentorship opportunities for women in the industry because they can be “few and far between.” Now, McCullom said she is looking forward to paying it forward by mentoring future female leaders in the industry.

“You might not be the first person to walk down this path, but you are the latest and that matters,” McCullom said.

There is reason to believe that the number of women in leadership roles at Colorado commercial real estate firms will grow in the future as well. About 46.1% of small businesses in Colorado are owned by women, according to the Small Business Administration’s 2022 state profile, which is an increase of about 1.1% year-over-year. That increase of representation could come as the commercial real estate industry continues to recover from the pandemic-induced economic downturn.

On July 26, the Federal Reserve increased its target interest rate range  to 5.25%-5.5%, the highest in more than two decades. Meanwhile, many offices in Denver remain empty as remote and hybrid work continue to disrupt the labor market and impact city tax collections.

Dean Callan & Co. President Becky Callan said these conditions have forced many commercial firms to focus on delivering value for their clients, whether that is through quality services or creative deal-making. To Callan, who has more than three decades of experience as her company’s chief executive, that means managing expectations for sellers, buyers, landlords and tenants alike.

Morgan Lysohir, Milender White’s Rocky Mountain district manager and senior vice president, said firms should also think about ways to solidify their talent pipeline for when the economy roars back, including improving diversity in their hiring practices. Part of that effort should be getting back to face-to-face interactions and changing the narrative about the construction industry for younger generations.

“This is a human industry,” Lysohir said. “It takes human hands, a lot of them, to make these projects work.”