In Portland, Ore., two women who own a development firm could not get a real estate broker to consider an offer they made to buy some land. But when they got a male developer friend to call the broker and put in the same offer, it was immediately accepted.
In Durham, N.C., a Jamaican American woman who is an interior designer and a small residential builder discovered that a tradesman was quoting her $7 more per square foot compared with her white male peers — a meaningful increase when working on properties with thousands of square feet.
The real estate development industry remains dominated by white men, and many female developers say they often feel that they’re being treated differently in their work because of their gender. Women own just 2.8 percent of real estate firms and occupy 9 percent of the C-suite in commercial real estate. Black and Hispanic women are in an even smaller minority, given that Black people represent just 0.4 percent of developers and Hispanic people 0.16 percent. Only 1.8 percent of real estate firms are minority-owned.
According to a 2020 study from the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network, there is also a gap in men’s and women’s compensation in the industry, and especially in their commissions and bonuses. White women earn 51 percent less than men in commissions and bonuses, Black women 71 percent less, Asian women 73 percent less and Hispanic women 74 percent less.
Alicia Glen, a former deputy mayor of New York City, is the founder of MSquared, which invests in and develops mixed-income and mixed-use real estate projects. She said that she often provides a “sanity check” to other women in the development sector, validating their perceptions of bias.
Ms. Glen, 58, cited her own experience as evidence of bias against women. “Somebody with my résumé leaving government, and with all the sort of fancy titles I have, and education, and running a big business at Goldman Sachs, and being the deputy mayor, for all this, I had trouble raising money,” she said. “My male counterparts — takes them two phone calls, they can raise a billion dollars.”
“It is so structurally and institutionally baked into the way people think about real estate and investment that you actually do think you’re going crazy,” Ms. Glen added. “Like how can this be? But it is true.”
Most veteran developers interviewed by The New York Times acknowledged that the industry had made progress over the course of their careers, and that there were some glimmers of hope. The CREW study found that women occupied 29 percent of brokerage positions, an increase of six percentage points from 2015, and 32 percent of women were aspiring to C-suite positions, an increase of four percentage points from 2015. But women’s representation in commercial real estate as a whole and in its top positions hasn’t changed meaningfully, according to the study, and the gender compensation gap persists and in recent years even widened.
“This industry has a long way to go until we eradicate racism and sexism and make a commitment from the top down throughout an organization to give everyone a fair chance at success, and I think that it’ll be done,” Wendy Mann, the chief executive of the CREW Network, said, adding, “I may not see it in my lifetime, unfortunately.”
The Times talked to 17 female developers and contractors — as well as some of their male peers — around the country. These women shared the obstacles they had faced, citing microaggressions, discrimination and sexual harassment.
‘This Is Happening’
After seven years at Guerrilla Development, Anna Mackay was at a crossroads: She could either pursue partnership there or start her own venture. She decided to found a development firm, Sister City, in Portland in 2020.
A little over a year later, she co-founded Shortstack Housing with her business partner, Jessy Ledesma, 41, who also has her own firm, HomeWork Development. They conceived their joint venture to take advantage of new laws that were favorable to the kind of middle-income housing they wanted to build.
But there was a hiccup after they found a plot of land for one development. “We put together a proposal for the selling agent and called them up and were really professional and gave our terms,” said Ms. Mackay, 39. “And that agent was just like, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not going to work for us,’ and hung up. And it was really evident that they weren’t even really considering the offer.”
That’s when Ms. Mackay went to her mentor, Guerrilla Development’s owner, Kevin Cavenaugh, and asked him to try calling with the same offer.
Mr. Cavenaugh said he had been skeptical. He recalled telling her: “‘That’s impossible, Anna. You’re so smart. You’re so articulate. You’re so on your game.’”
But Ms. Mackay held firm, he said. “She’s like: ‘You’re right. But actually, Kevin, you’re wrong. This is happening.’”
The real estate broker accepted Mr. Cavenaugh’s $1.15 million offer. “This can’t be real,” he said of his reaction. “This is a story line. This is a stock character in a movie, in a bad movie. But no, it was real.”
Construction on 36 apartments is now underway. The units, mostly two- and three-bedrooms, will be ready in April. Shortstack Housing is working with the Somali American Council of Oregon to place the first tenants.
‘Tale of Two Clients’
Alicia Hylton-Daniel, 52, an interior designer and general contractor in Durham, began doing small development projects in 2017. Soon her company was thriving, landing a design competition nomination and gigs with HGTV’s “Love It or List It.” Yet Ms. Hylton-Daniel also ran into issues with brokers.
She recalled that one broker, whom she considered a friend, wouldn’t show her properties available in trendy downtown neighborhoods, but, she later found out, would offer them to his white male client. Ms. Hylton-Daniel was shown only properties in more economically distressed areas that were historically segregated Black.
“It was kind of like the tale of two clients,” she said. When Ms. Hylton-Daniel later asked the broker about it in a friendly conversation, she recalled, he explained that he had thought she wouldn’t want the property anyway, and he praised her ability to transform challenging real estate, Ms. Hylton-Daniel said.
“It could be a compliment, or it could be gaslighting,” she said, adding that such gatekeeping affects her revenue potential. “Yes, these neighborhoods are up and coming, but understand that I’m never going to get the same comp.”
Ms. Hylton-Daniel said she also learned that tradespeople were overcharging her, and confirmed this by asking white male colleagues what rates they were getting. In one instance, she said, she was quoted $7 more per square foot than her friend for the same tile work.
Ms. Hylton-Daniel said she now has a great team of subcontractors in place, but she enlists her husband when negotiating with someone new. “Once he became the face to negotiate or talk directly to the trades[people], then that relationship got better because he was relatable in terms of being male,” she said.
‘A Little Lipstick’
Women-owned real estate firms are in charge of just 1.7 percent of real estate assets under management. It’s a stark reminder that women were long treated like second-class citizens. In the past, unmarried women could be denied credit simply based on their gender, and they often had to have male co-signers. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which prohibits creditors from discriminating based on sex, marital status, race and other attributes, wasn’t passed until 1974.
Jennifer Haskamp, 45, founder of Kamp development firm in St. Paul, Minn., said that potential investors, mostly men, often comment on how well prepared she is, noting that her financial projections are “more detailed than I’ve seen from most projects.” But they still don’t invest.
Ms. Haskamp was motivated to start her own ventures, she said, after a supervisor at a firm serving the commercial real estate sector sexually harassed her early in her career.
She said she had strong evidence, including a text message suggesting that she “take one for the team.” But, she said, “the attorney basically told me, ‘If you want to work in this field, in this market, just know that if you do pursue a lawsuit, that you’ll kind of get a big red X.’” He also warned her “that reputation will get around,” she said.
A couple of years ago, she presented a pitch deck for a $20 million 70-unit multifamily project, which highlighted Kamp’s unique concept for work-from-home space incorporated into apartments of all sizes, even as small as 500 square feet. Her presentation covered specifics about the company, as well as the project’s architectural concepts, site plan and financials. The feedback she received was on her headshot: “Maybe if you put a little lipstick on and shined your lips up a little bit.”
‘What Do You Do Here?’
The bar is simply higher for women, said Anyeley Hallová, 48, who founded Adre development firm in Portland in 2020.
She has degrees from Cornell, Harvard and M.I.T., along with accolades and a governor appointment. “I have to do all that education, I have to get all that P.R., I have to get all the awards, I have to get all this validation, just to be like, I’m a real estate developer,” she said. People often think she is an architect, unable to fathom that a Black woman could be a developer, she said. As one architect-turned-developer put it in an interview, architects get the smallest seat at the table, while developers decide how big the table is and who’s invited to it.
Over the 12 years that Ms. Hallová was a partner with two men at a real estate development firm, people regularly failed to acknowledge her leadership role, she said. “It was always like, ‘What do you do here?’ I was never recognized for literally just the work I was doing.”
Ms. Hallová argued that diversity is an asset the industry could be missing out on. She cited the residential treatment facility for teenage boys she is currently building, informed by her experience as the mother of a boy around the same age.
Female developers tend to think more about safety in public spaces and consider their own experiences, she said. “At a lot of public facilities, when you’re a woman standing in a line for a bathroom, you know a woman wasn’t a part of this.”
