Join me and 120-plus leading real estate firms calling for DEI action

Real Estate Balance has been on an incredible journey since it was founded in 2015 to address the gender imbalance at senior levels in the UK property industry – a space which was notorious for being a hard-to-access ‘secret sector’, especially for women and minority groups.

Since then, the organisation has grown from its humble beginnings into a leading diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) organisation whose 120-plus members include some of the biggest names in UK property today – such as British Land, CBRE, The Crown Estate, Landsec, Tesco Property and many more.

We know from our 2022 industry survey that most property organisations are now engaging with DEI in their own way, but some are still going it alone, without the support of the wider community as represented by the Real Estate Balance membership.

In this column, I’d like to take the opportunity to share ways we’re helping firms to accelerate their progress on DEI and why we need now more organisations to get involved.

I believe it’s only by working collaboratively across the industry – sharing best practice and tackling the issues together – that we can truly create lasting change, make real estate representative of our society and transform it into the open, diverse and inclusive industry it deserves to be.

Real Estate Balance – some background

Since 2021, Real Estate Balance has broadened its scope – moving beyond addressing gender imbalance alone to embracing wider DEI objectives such as ethnicity and social mobility, enabling us to support an even more diverse range of under-represented groups.

We now run the largest and most comprehensive survey of gender balance and DEI in real estate, are setting leadership standards through our 10 CEO Commitments on Diversity and are breaking new ground with our popular speed-mentoring programme, which promotes intergenerational understanding by providing minority groups the opportunity to meet with industry leaders and assist them in becoming more inclusive.

Our Parents’ Network supports new parents of all genders back into work following a period of paternal leave, while our NextGen Committee is focused on nurturing a diverse talent pipeline.

From the very beginning, we recognised that for diversity to truly flourish, it needs to be treated as a strategic, business-critical priority that’s supported at the very top of an organisation and integrated throughout.

That’s why we work across all levels of real estate, helping CEOs become accountable for driving DEI across their organisations, supporting middle managers to create inclusive workplace cultures, and empowering the next generation of leaders to unlock their potential and thrive.

Through our range of programmes, campaigns and events, we support our members to take meaningful action on DEI and so contribute to the enhanced performance of the sector as a whole.

Working together to achieve lasting change

Real and lasting change can’t happen in silos – it needs the entire industry to address the challenges, share what’s working and come up with new ways of moving forward together.

I know many real estate organisations are working on improving their own DEI performance, but unless this is part of a wider conversation encompassing the industry as a whole, I wonder how sustainable that change is going to be. Being joined up and communicating with each other is one of the most effective ways to achieve change, and Real Estate Balance offers an accessible forum for such exchanges to take place.

Our website is full of resources that members can use off-the-shelf or adapt to their own working environments, such as our comprehensive DEI Toolkit or our Guide to DEI Data Collection, produced in partnership with PwC. We’ve always partnered with leading real estate firms to deliver practical tools for our members, and we’re an ally and member of a number of industry bodies that are also leading the way on DEI, including Black Professionals in Construction, Diversity Talks Real Estate and Freehold LGBT.

So, if you’re grappling with difficult DEI issues or want to be part of a movement of progressive and inclusive organisations, then please come and talk to me – I can signpost you towards the best DEI resources our industry has to offer and show you what’s working elsewhere. This autumn, I hope you’ll join me and the 100+ Real Estate Balance members so together we can amplify the voices calling for change.

Sue Brown is managing director of Real Estate Balance