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What Initiatives Work In Hitting DEI Targets And How Can We Avoid Tokenism In Real Estate?

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Mar 9, 2022

Summary: On
this episode of Propcast, Louisa speaks with
Jeanne Casey and Jacinda Lofland from Nuveen Real Estate. They talk about what led them to the
innovation, sustainability and technology space at one of the
largest real estate investment managers globally. Jeanne and
Jacinda explain what works in creating a diverse and inclusive
powerful team, and how to avoid the issue of tokenism. They
elaborate on needing strategy and investment decisions and how ESG,
technology and community play a part in all of it. Lastly, they’ll
give us some home truths about what they think needs to change in
terms of adoption and integration. The key takeaway from this
episode is that the crux of the diversity issue is around
retaining, promoting and genuinely empowering diverse talent that’s
already within the organisation.

Resources:

Companies Mentioned:

Shout Outs:

Key Insights From This Episode: 

 

  • In 2021
    we saw a 30% increase in ESG consultants and a 26% increase in ESG
    analysts. We also saw a 20% increase in innovation. –
    Louisa

 

  • The crux of the diversity issue is around
    retaining, promoting and genuinely empowering diverse talent that’s
    already within the organisation. – Jeanne
  • It’s so important that sustainability is not a
    side job.  – Jacinda
  • There’s wide recognition that technology is
    going to play an outsized role in achieving fairly ambitious
    net-zero carbon and other sustainability goals. –
    Jeanne

About Our Guests:

Jeanne Casey is the Global Head of PropTech and Innovation
at
Nuveen, and leads investments and insights in
PropTech for the firm. Previously, Jeanne was a Principal at
MetaProp, a leading PropTech venture capital firm based in New
York. Prior to joining MetaProp, Jeanne was a founding team member
and Vice President at Digital Alpha where she worked on the launch,
fundraising, and deployment of a $300 million growth equity fund
focused on digital infrastructure. She has previous experience with
Cisco and Morgan Stanley, and holds a MBA from Harvard Business
School and a BA with honours from Johns Hopkins
University.

As Director of Customers &
Community,
Jacinda Lofland works with Nuveen Real Estate’s operating partners to improve customer
experience and productivity, engage with customers around ESG
initiatives, promote and collaborate with community organisations
and local businesses, and to measure, analyse, and act on customer
feedback. Jacinda helped develop and roll out Nuveen Real Estate’s
smart, sustainable building blueprint for various sectors. Prior to
Nuveen Real Estate, Jacinda was a Director on the Real Estate team
at Selina and prior to that, she led the Finance team at Remote
Year. Jacinda has previous experience in real estate equity and
debt investments with TIAA, auditing with PwC, and she holds a B.A.
in Business Economics from UCLA. 

Nuveen Real Estate is one of the largest real estate investment
managers in the world with $142 billion of assets under management.
Managing a suite of real estate funds and mandates, across both
public and private investments, and spanning both debt and equity
across diverse geographies and investment styles, we provide access
to every aspect of real estate investing. With over 85 years of
real estate investing experience and more than 600+ employees
located across over 30 cities throughout the United States, Europe
and Asia Pacific, the platform offers unparalleled geographic
reach, which is married with deep sector
expertise. 

About Our Host

Louisa Dickins


https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisa-dickins-ab065392/

Louisa started her career in
property working at a well-known estate agency in London. Realising
her people skills, she moved over to Lloyd May to pursue a career
in recruitment. She now is a Director at
LMRE, who are a specialist recruitment firm driven
by PropTech and recruitment professionals, and Louisa oversees
their 5 core areas. Louisa co-founded LMRE and provides a
constructive recruitment platform to the new disruptors in real
estate. Louisa is also on the board of Directors at UK PropTech
Association (UKPA).

About LMRE

www.lmre.tech

LMRE believe there is a better
way to recruit.
LMRE focus on a more comprehensive, client led focus
delivering exceptional talent to the place at the time. They are
passionate about the industry and passionate about people’s
careers. LMRE spend time with each client to become and an
extension of the business, and their transparency and core values
help them grow with the sector. LMRE simplify recruitment and
innovate with our clients and evolve the people driven, PropTech
community.

Timestamps:

[01:45] Jeanne, how did you get
started in this space and your role? 

  • I have been in venture capital for over 10
    years. Half of that time I have focussed on PropTech and most
    recently at MetaProp. 
  • I started my investing career in FinTech at
    Morgan Stanley in the early 2010s and then I worked at a fund that
    spun out of Cisco. We were investing in digital infrastructure,
    including smart cities and IOT and that’s what led me to
    PropTech.

[02:55] Jacinda, can you tell us
about your journey? 

  • I started out at PwC and I worked mostly on
    commercial real estate clients. 
  • My first time with Tiaa was back in 2013 and I
    did commercial mortgage originations as well as equity investments
    on the West Coast.
  • I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina and was the
    first finance hire for Remote Year. I worked for Selina for about
    10 months after that.
  • After that, I came back to Nuveen where my
    focus is customers, community and the experience of our end users
    as well as engaging around ESG. 

[06:30] Jeanne, what do you
think can be done to attract more diversity to this
space?

  • The crux of the issue is around retaining,
    promoting and genuinely empowering diverse talent that’s already
    within the organisation.

[07:20] What is Nuveen doing in
terms of their hiring? 

  •  Jeanne and I sit on the Insights Team
    which is led by Abigail Dean and that team includes our research
    team, sustainability, PropTech, Customers & Communication and
    Innovation. 

[09:40] There is a lot of women
leadership at Nuveen, what do you think can be done to increase
this?

  • I think it’s beyond just attracting and
    recruiting diverse talent. It is about retaining, promoting and
    empowering the talent that already sits within an
    organisation. 
  • Our DEI initiatives are more genuine and
    actually reflect what our teams look like.

[11:45] Jacinda, you are from
more of a real estate side, what have you seen in terms of
diversity and inclusion? 

  • We’re making meaningful
    progress. 
  • There have been a lot of reports around the
    benefits of diversity.
  • Implicit bias training has been a really
    important step for us.
  • It’s important to hire outside of the same sets
    of colleges that might have strong, finance or real estate
    programs.

[19:50] Is there anything more
you want to delve into about what you’ve seen in the more VC
(corporate side), or within the startups? 

  • I’ve seen a lot of genuine improvement over the
    decade.
  • I’ve always been at the intersection of finance
    and technology and both of those are historically very male
    dominated, very white dominated and a little bit older. I think
    that’s largely, or at least in the process of changing quite a
    bit.
  • Boardrooms and investment teams look quite a
    bit different than when I started just 10 years ago.

[19:10] Talk us through the
focus for 2022.

  • Our tomorrow’s world strategy, there are three
    key things that we focus on; sustainability, technology and
    demographics.  
  • We have what we call a smart, sustainable
    building blueprint (SSBB) and there are a number of categories that
    we think really tied to those three overarching themes; energy,
    water, waste, resilience, health, and wealth, tenants & community,
    leasing and data & digitalisation.
  • We want to build on our partnership with
    Fitwell.
  • We’ll be launching a VC strategy in the coming
    months.
  • The two, overarching themes
    are; 
    • a data strategy and tools and new technologies
      that help unlock our own proprietary data across our massive
      portfolio. 
    • the intersection of sustainability and ESG with
      PropTech 

[27:40] What do you think the
industry could do better as a whole to move things forward in terms
of adoption/integration?

  • Incentives alignment is an area that is still
    fairly nebulous.
  • Cascading goals around our own compensation
    targets that are specifically tied to sustainability and innovation
    goals. 
  • Rethinking how our buildings work, but also
    rethinking how we work.

 

 [31:40] The ‘LMRE’ part,
Louisa asks the guests to talk about:

 

  • Lessons learned in your
    career

 

  • Jeanne: Throw out for a 5- or 10-year
    plan.

 

  • Mention a person, product or
    service

 

  • Jacinda: Our asset management teams and then
    the properties that sign up and do pilots.
  • Cushman & Wakefield and Industrious
    Office

 

  • Rewarding parts of working in the
    space: 

 

  • Jeanne: I love real estate and PropTech because
    I love seeing the tangible impacts on the ways that people work,
    live and spend all of our time.

 

  • What are you most Excited about for the
    future of the space?:  

 

  • Jacinda:  Data Standardisation and Climate
    Tech. 

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