“Six years ago there weren’t any LGBT people in property,” said David Mann, executive board member of consultancy TFT and founding partner of Freehold, in his opening gambit at the first LGBT property business diversity conference yesterday.
That, of course, was false. There just weren’t any open LGBT people in property. The same cannot be said today. Although there is still plenty of work to be done (see EG’s groundbreaking survey on LGBT inclusion in real estate).
The conference, co-hosted by BNP Paribas Real Estate and JLL, was set up to showcase the importance of diversity across the industry and to facilitate a RICS best practice document on LGBT inclusion in real estate.
Attended by the senior director and chief executives of most of the major agencies and numerous clients, the event provided a forum for an open discussion about LGBT issues in real estate and how to create a truly diverse workforce.
Chief among them was that diversity led to significant business benefits. Both JLL UK chief executive and British Land boss Chris Grigg said stakeholders were demanding businesses had workforces and policies that reflected their own.
“A lot of our clients are looking across their supplier base and putting more of an onus on suppliers to make sure that our ethical goals and targets fit with theirs,” said Ireland. “They are being quite strong on that and saying that if they don’t then you can look forward to getting less work.”
Grigg agreed: “There is a wall of expectation coming at us as to what our stakeholders, ranging from government to suppliers to people buying from us, are going to expect. If we can’t answer their questions satisfactorily that will be bad for us.”
He said millennials expected diversity and inclusion principles and policies to be commonplace and that firms without them in place would be unable to recruit those people as they would be regarded as peculiar.
“Tone from the top does make a difference,” said Grigg. “If you don’t have that then it is really hard to make progress. If people do not believe that those people at a senior level in the business are committed then it ain’t going to work.”
Ruth Hunt, chief executive of LGBT campaign group and charity Stonewall, said firms it worked with would all say they only ever recruited the best person for the job and they don’t care whether they are blue, green, yellow, pink, gay or straight. But, said Hunt, that was never true as meritocracies cannot work.
“Even when you have your Benetton advert of diversity around your table; your woman, your black one, your gay one, they still feel obliged to think, act, work, respond in the same way,” she said. “If you can crack that, diversity will be an outcome of what you do.“
She added: “The other big mistake organisations make is they think about diversity in terms of the beginning. They think: ‘If we recruit 10% BAME people, if we recruit 50% women, we will have a diverse outcome.’ But if you change your way of working, then diversity will come.
“That means changing what leadership looks like, changing what success looks like, changing how you value how people contribute to the organisation. This will not happen without genuine, wholehearted belief from senior leadership that this is the right thing to do.”
This need for real acceptance, not just tolerance, of LGBT people within the real estate sector by senior management was one of a handful of recommendations suggested by the audience for the RICS best practice.
JLL senior surveyor Kelly Canterford went so far as to say it was allies, not LGBT people, who would ultimately change the environment by stepping up and calling out unacceptable behaviour.
Other suggestions for the RICS document included the need to engage more with undergraduates in a bid to stop 62% of them feeling the need to go back in the closet when starting work, engaging more with regional businesses and creating a language charter.
Click here for full coverage of the event and stories, podcast and videos investigating LGBT inclusion in real estate.
To send feedback, e-mail Samantha.McClary@egi.co.uk or tweet @Samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette
