WASHINGTON — For the first time since the inception of a closely watched annual industry study in 2020, the upper echelons of corporate America’s commercial real estate (CRE) sector have grown less diverse.
According to the seventh annual Bisnow Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Data Series, the number of women and people of color holding C-suite positions and corporate board seats among the industry’s largest firms declined over the past year. This reversal marks an abrupt halt to what had been a slow, steady, and hard-fought trajectory toward inclusive leadership across the real estate landscape.
The shift coincides with sweeping political and regulatory headwinds. Driven by the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on corporate diversity programs—coupled with mounting pressure from anti-DEI activists and conservative legal groups—real estate corporations are systematically dismantling or softening the initiatives they eagerly embraced in the wake of the 2020 racial justice reckoning.
Employment attorneys, diversity advocates, and industry executives say the cooling-off period has evolved into a full-scale retreat. Beyond scrubbing corporate websites of DEI terminology, firms are abandoning targeted recruitment, eliminating diverse candidate slates, and watching seasoned minority and female leaders depart for more hospitable environments.
Main Facts: The Turning Tide in Commercial Real Estate
The latest Bisnow analysis tracked 99 of the largest commercial real estate firms in the United States. The tally is down one from the previous year due to the high-profile August merger between apartment giants AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential, which consolidated market power while reshaping executive suites.
Across the 99 analyzed companies:
- Women in the C-Suite: Totaled 324 jobs, down from 344 last year. Their overall executive representation dropped from 20.79% to 19.52%.
- People of Color in the C-Suite: Held 178 executive roles, accounting for 14.44% of overall suites—a decline from 185 positions and 14.79% the prior year.
- Corporate Boards: People of color held 139 board seats (down from 158), with their overall representation sliding from 20.79% to 19.52%. Conversely, women’s board seats fell numerically from 250 to 236, though an overall contraction in total board seats caused their percentage representation to tick up marginally from 32.89% to 33.15%.
Among the four primary sectors tracked—lenders, brokerages, real estate investment trusts (REITs), and property managers—the sharpest declines were registered within the lending community and corporate brokerages. Lenders saw the share of people of color in C-suites drop from 22.1% to 19.49%, while women’s representation fell from 31.09% to 28.88%. In brokerages, people of color held just 10.92% of C-suite roles—the lowest proportion among all analyzed sectors.
Chronology: From 2020 Commitments to 2026 Retrenchment
To understand how the commercial real estate sector reached this tipping point, industry analysts point to a distinct five-year chronology defined by shifting sociopolitical pressures:
2020–2023: The Reckoning and Measured Growth
Following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent national Black Lives Matter protests, commercial real estate firms—traditionally dominated by white men—faced intense public scrutiny from institutional investors, employees, and state officials. In response, hundreds of public and private companies instituted formal DEI frameworks. Firms began broadening their recruitment pipelines to intentionally source diverse candidate pools, often evaluating multiple demographic segments before selecting final hires. This era saw incremental, year-over-year gains in executive and board diversity.
2024–Early 2025: The Political Pivot and Legal Scrutiny
As political winds shifted and conservative legal challenges against affirmative action gained traction in the courts, corporate boards began reassessing their exposure. Research firm PeopleReturn noted that nearly half of all S&P 500 companies maintained a policy factoring race and gender into board nominations in 2024; by the following year, that figure had plummeted to 23%.
By early 2025, major financial institutions began openly dismantling their programs. In February 2025, Bloomberg reported that Wells Fargo scrapped a long-standing policy requiring diverse candidate slates for senior-level recruitment. By August 2025, HR Brew revealed that the bank had quietly deleted its entire public DEI page. Simultaneously, government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—previously lauded as diversity leaders—saw executive representation decline for the second consecutive year under a board chaired by Trump ally Bill Pulte.
Late 2025–2026: The Federal Crackdown and False Claims Act Deployments
The federal government introduced a novel and aggressive enforcement strategy utilizing the False Claims Act. The Trump administration began asserting that federal contractors engaging in hiring practices that considered race or gender were committing fraud against the government.
High-profile enforcement actions quickly followed. The Department of Justice secured major settlements with corporate giants IBM ($17 million) and Deloitte ($21.5 million) over allegations that their recruitment programs violated employment discrimination laws. Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a stern warning to corporations, stating that labeling discriminatory practices as "DEI" did not grant them legal immunity.
Faced with this hostile regulatory climate, commercial real estate firms responded swiftly. According to the Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) 2026 Global Real Estate Workforce Survey, roughly 38% of real estate firms altered their corporate vocabulary over the past year, scrubbing words like "diversity" in favor of broader terms like "inclusivity" or "belonging." However, 71% of firms reported keeping inclusivity-related spending flat, indicating that companies are attempting to preserve workplace culture while legally insulating themselves through semantic restructuring.
Supporting Data: Sector-by-Sector Breakdown
The erosion of upper-level diversity was not distributed evenly; it deeply affected institutions heavily reliant on federal backing, public capital markets, and massive transactional networks.
Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs)
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac experienced significant executive drain. Fannie Mae’s C-suite features just three people of color, down from four in 2025 and five in 2024. Its female executive count dropped to three, down from five the prior year and eight in 2024. Freddie Mac followed a similar trajectory, retaining three executives of color (down from four in 2025 and six in 2024) and only two women in its top ranks, compared to three last year and four the year before.
Banking and Lending
Wells Fargo’s leadership suite contracted and grew less diverse. The bank shifted from a 16-person C-suite housing five people of color and four women down to a 14-person executive team containing just three people of color and three women.
Mega-Mergers and Market Consolidation
Mergers and acquisitions also played a disruptive role. The massive August merger between AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential birthed Vivmark Residential, now the largest U.S. apartment owner with over 184,000 units. Despite the combined legacy firms having a modest baseline of diversity prior to the deal, Vivmark’s newly appointed nine-person C-suite includes five women but zero people of color. Its nine-member board features two people of color and five women.
Brokerage Real Estate
Brokerage firms continue to struggle with foundational inclusion. Christopher Okada, an Asian American owner of New York-based brokerage Okada & Co., argued that major commercial brokerages were never genuinely invested in inclusive hiring.
"It’s not a top 10 priority," Okada said. "I don’t think it ever was."
He noted that women and people of color face an uneven playing field at institutional brokerages, driving frustrated talent toward smaller boutique firms or residential enterprises with commercial divisions. These grassroots departures shrink the internal talent pool, making it mathematically harder to cultivate diverse executive pipelines over time.
Official Responses and Legal Perspectives
Legal experts emphasize that while employment law under Title VII has not technically changed, the enforcement priorities of federal agencies have shifted dramatically.
Jennifer Cluverius, who leads the labor and employment practice group at Maynard Nexsen, explained that the fear of federal litigation has paralyzed corporate HR departments.
"I think some employers have pulled back on that because they’re scared to do it," Cluverius said. "You are definitely less likely to talk about it openly now, but definitely also less likely to be doing the things that you need to do to get a diverse applicant pool."
Cluverius acknowledged that during the post-2020 push, some corporations crossed legal boundaries by quietly utilizing race as a tiebreaker between equally qualified candidates—a practice the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is now aggressively targeting.
Cara Yates Crotty, co-chair of the DEI compliance group at employment law firm Constangy, noted that corporate legal teams are conducting exhaustive audits of internal programs.
"HR legal departments are taking the time to do a thorough inventory of the policies and practices they have that could be related to DEI-type programs and really doing a deep dive just to see if there are any potential concerns that hadn’t come to light before," Yates Crotty said.
She added that cosmetic changes, such as renaming employee resource groups (ERGs) or scrubbing website buzzwords, will offer little protection if the underlying mechanics violate federal statutes.
"The Trump administration has made it clear that they don’t care what you call it. It’s the substance that matters," Yates Crotty warned. "Changing the name of something that’s problematic under Title VII or some other discrimination law is not going to save the day."
Nevertheless, compliance experts stress that fostering a welcoming, harassment-free workplace remains entirely lawful. The administration’s executive actions target specific, unlawful quota-based systems and hiring preferences—not the broader pursuit of inclusive company cultures.
Implications: The Human Toll and Future Outlook
Beyond boardrooms and legal briefs, the industry-wide backslide is having a profound psychological and professional impact on mid-level minority and female professionals within commercial real estate.
Taneshia Nash Laird, executive director of Project REAP—an organization dedicated to advancing underrepresented groups in commercial real estate—reported an exodus of diverse talent from large institutional firms.
"People are leaving," Nash Laird said. "If there are less women and people of color in those senior roles, they’re leaving those roles because the environment is hostile for them, because this is an industry that is built upon relationships."
Nash Laird noted that she has sat in corporate strategy meetings where executives explicitly cite legal exposure as the primary reason to scale back mentorship and sponsorship initiatives.
"I’ve been in meetings where people have said, ‘We have to be very careful with our language because of legal exposure,’" she shared. "They do not want to be on the receiving end of federal lawsuits."
Despite the hostile current climate, Nash Laird urges rising professionals not to abandon the sector entirely. She emphasizes that grassroots community networking, peer-to-peer mentoring, and long-term career persistence remain vital tools for surviving the current retrenchment and positioning oneself for leadership when political cycles inevitably shift again.
For an industry traditionally governed by insular, relationship-driven networks, the retreat of corporate diversity initiatives risks calcifying old habits. As commercial real estate navigates macroeconomic pressures, higher interest rates, and a turbulent regulatory landscape, the question remains whether the sector’s temporary backslide will harden into permanent stagnation or merely serve as a temporary pause in a generational evolution.
