COMMENT Diversity in action comes in many forms. There is diversity in terms of recruitment, working to make sure you’re bringing a diverse set of people into the business, which could be looking to recruit for gender diversity or from a socio-economic perspective. Then there’s recruiting for regional diversity. We need to understand different areas of a country to create effective solutions – it makes more sense to identify someone with an in-depth knowledge of that region.
But recruitment is just one side of the coin. The other side is creating a working environment where people can thrive and not just have the same voices making decisions. It’s about celebrating those points of difference, using those different voices and skills to influence change.
Celebrating difference
DE&I is absolutely essential to real estate. As an industry, real estate is building, shaping and adapting, and using places that we need for living and working and fun.
Pretty much anything you can think of needs some form of real estate to make that happen, so we need an industry that reflects the diversity of the people using those properties. Otherwise it’s incredibly difficult to do this job well.
And that extends beyond residential and office buildings. If you want to build or manage a retail environment that works, you need to understand the customers who are going to be shopping there. For hotels, you need to understand the end user. Yes, you can imagine what other people would want, but you’re always going to get smarter and more interesting suggestions when you have a diverse group of people creating those solutions.
Staying focused on ESG
Looking at real estate more broadly, given the difficult year it has had, there is a risk that ESG could be deprioritised. However, the consensus is that we don’t have time to waste.
We are still implementing ESG strategies in real estate because the long-term success of assets depends on their ESG criteria. The sooner you can make these changes, the better.
For managers, understanding ESG is not an optional component anymore. It’s something you need to understand to do your job. Investors want to understand what we are doing, what we are planning.
Challenges remain within real estate but ESG is at the heart of so many strategies now. It’s still a priority.
Exploring beyond carbon and energy, looking at nature-positive solutions, is where I think we will see some interesting changes going forward.
We have biodiversity net gain regulations coming in the near future – it’s no longer this November, but soon – and these will require us to look at land use in a different, more holistic way.
For example, if you implement “blue green infrastructure” on a retail park you could see improved biodiversity, improved drainage, reduced heating effects from climate change and a more useable, enjoyable environment.
What the EG Future Leaders programme has helped me realise is that we all have something important to say, be that on diversity, ESG, or something else, and that we all have the opportunity, skill and creativity to get ideas out there and to make a difference.
Ellie Awford is senior associate (real estate) at Nuveen and an EG Future Leader
