This is the first part of the seventh annual installment of Bisnow’s DEI Data Series, an ongoing investigative project that examines the diversity of the boards and executive leadership of the biggest companies in commercial real estate. To read previous years’ entries, please click here.
The number of people of color and women in the C-suites of commercial real estate’s largest firms dropped over the past year.
It’s the first time since Bisnow launched its annual analysis of the industry’s upper-level diversity in 2020 that the industry’s dominance by white men increased. Every prior year in the analysis showed gradual, steady gains in the diversity of CRE’s upper echelon.
This shift didn’t come as a surprise to diversity advocates and employment attorneys, given how noticeably commercial real estate companies have backed away from their efforts to hire diverse executives as the Trump administration has cracked down on corporate diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
They say companies have gone beyond just removing DEI references from their websites, halting practices like intentionally creating diverse candidate pools and using a person’s race or gender as a tiebreaker in job decisions. Plus, they say some women and people of color are choosing to depart large companies given the challenges they face in this new environment.
“People are leaving,” said Project REAP Executive Director Taneshia Nash Laird, whose organization works to grow the presence of underrepresented groups in commercial real estate. “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.”
:quality(75))
Bisnow/created with ChatGPT
Bisnow’s analysis tracked 99 of the largest firms, one fewer than last year due to the August merger of two firms on the list: apartment giants AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential.
Across those 99 firms, women held 324 C-suite jobs, down from 344 last year — and their percentage of overall executives fell from 20.79% to 19.52%.
People of color held 178 C-suite roles, accounting for 14.44% of the overall executive suites — down from 185 and 14.79% last year.
Among the four sectors Bisnow analyzed, the sharpest drops in C-suite diversity came from the ranks of lenders.
People of color made up 19.49% of lenders’ C-suites, down from 22.1% last year, and the share of women dropped from 31.09% to 28.88%.
The makeup of these companies’ boards of directors also shifted. People of color held 139 board seats this year, down from 158 last year, and their share of all board seats fell from 20.79% to 19.52%.
Women held 236 board seats this year, down from 250 last year — though a drop in the overall number of board directors in Bisnow’s analysis led their percentage to tick up from 32.89% to 33.15%.
Many public companies have pulled back from efforts to make their boards more diverse. They had previously enacted DEI policies for board recruitment in the face of pressure from institutional investors and state officials, but now the pressure is coming from anti-DEI activists and the Trump administration, and they are scrapping those initiatives.
In 2024, nearly half of S&P 500 companies had a policy of considering gender, racial and ethnic diversity in board nominations, but last year, that had dropped to 23%, according to research firm PeopleReturn. This year, it is only 11.3%.
The pressure on companies to increase their diversity ramped up in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests, and companies across commercial real estate and other industries made commitments to increase the diversity of their ranks.
In many cases, they worked to achieve those goals by broadening their hiring searches to bring in a more diverse pool of applicants — before ultimately choosing the most qualified candidate.
“I think some employers have pulled back on that because they’re scared to do it,” said Jennifer Cluverius, leader of the labor and employment practice group at law firm Maynard Nexsen.
She said that while employment laws haven’t changed, the Trump administration’s crackdown on hiring practices that potentially favor minority groups has led companies to become more cautious about specifically targeting diverse populations in their searches.
“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,” she said.
Additionally, some companies previously used a candidate’s racial diversity as a tiebreaker in a situation where they were deciding between two equally qualified candidates, but Cluverius said that type of practice is illegal and has become a “big focus” of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Donald Trump.
“That’s got employers really stopping and thinking about whether they continue to engage in the same practices that they were before, which may have been yielding more diverse C-suite ranks in this industry and others,” she said.
The administration has employed a novel strategy to go after corporate DEI policies using the False Claims Act, arguing that companies that hold contracts with the federal government are engaging in fraud if they consider diversity in hiring initiatives. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the government was taking this approach for investigations into Alphabet and Verizon Communications. This year, the Department of Justice has reached settlements with IBM and Deloitte, which agreed to pay $17M and $21.5M, respectively, to resolve False Claims Act allegations.
“Government contractors cannot reward or penalize employees based on race or sex — and labeling the practice DEI does not make it lawful,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement about the Deloitte settlement.
Some large financial institutions have walked back from DEI practices. Wells Fargo discontinued a policy that had required diverse candidate slates for the first round of interviews for senior-level roles, Bloomberg reported in February 2025. Wells Fargo also eliminated all diversity language from its website, HR Brew reported in August 2025.
Wells Fargo’s executive suite became less diverse over the last year, Bisnow’s research found, though it was still more diverse than many in the analysis. The bank went from having five people of color and four women on its 16-person C-suite to having three people of color and three women among 14 C-suite executives.
Lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, previously two of the most diverse companies in Bisnow’s analysis, experienced declining diversity for the second straight year. The government-sponsored enterprises are chaired by Trump ally Bill Pulte.
Fannie now has three people of color in its C-suite, down from four in 2025 and five in 2024. And it has three women in the C-suite, down from five in 2025 and eight in 2024.
Freddie’s C-suite now has three people of color, down from four last year and six in 2024. And it has two top executives who are women, down from three last year and four the year before.
M&A activity also impacted Bisnow’s analysis this year, as two multifamily behemoths merged and named a new suite of executives and board directors.
Vivmark Residential, now the largest U.S. apartment owner, with more than 184,000 units, has two women and zero people of color on its nine-person C-suite.
The two companies that formed it, AvalonBay and Equity Residential, last year had a combined one person of color and two women on their C-suites, which totaled 15 people. Their boards last year had 22 total members with a combined four people of color and eight women.
Vivmark’s board now has nine members, including two people of color and five women.
Fannie, Freddie, Wells Fargo and Vivmark didn’t respond to Bisnow’s requests for comment.
Cara Yates Crotty, who co-chairs the DEI compliance group at employment law firm Constangy, said she has seen a change in corporate human resources policies that she described as “cautious and deliberate.”
“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,” she said.
After Trump returned to office last year and signed several anti-DEI executive orders, many companies took steps to broaden resources and employee groups that had been created for specific populations — an LGBTQIA+ or Latino club, for example — to be explicitly open to all staff.
Companies also stripped words like “diversity” from their websites and internal messaging and instead focused on concepts like internal equity and promoting company culture. But simply renaming existing programs without addressing how executive orders have shifted what is permitted and what isn’t is a risky prospect, and most firms have diligently worked to make sure they are aligned with current policy.
“The Trump administration has made it clear that they don’t care what you call it. It’s the substance that matters,” Yates Crotty said. “Changing the name of something that’s problematic under Title VII or some other discrimination law is not going to save the day.”
Nearly 4 in 10 commercial real estate firms reported changing terminology used to describe their diversity programs, moving away from the term “DEI” and toward broader terms, including “inclusivity” or “belonging,” according to ULI’s 2026 Global Real Estate Workforce Survey.
Although 38% of these firms have pulled back on the terms used to characterize their programs, over the 12 months ending in January, roughly 71% of firms reported no change in inclusivity-related spending.
Nash Laird said she has seen an increase in companies working with legal teams to find a way to still incorporate diversity and inclusion without using language that could make them a target of the administration’s crackdown.
“I’ve been in meetings where people have said, ‘We have to be very careful with our language because of legal exposure,’” Nash Laird said. “They do not want to be on the receiving end of federal lawsuits.”
The White House orders all specifically call out “illegal DEI policies,” leaving plenty of room for companies to continue to operate lawfully, Yates Crotty said.
“There’s nothing unlawful about wanting to have an inclusive workplace where people are comfortable and where we are not harassing people,” she said.
Cluverius said she did see instances during the previous diversity push where companies crossed the line of what is legal by using race as a tiebreaker when selecting for a role, but she said the Biden administration wasn’t cracking down on that the way Trump is.
“I do think that there were employers who had gone too far with respect to implementing their diversity initiatives to the point they were violating the law,” she said.
“But now, I feel like because there is such an emphasis on these government agencies kind of ferreting out and finding even private employers who have maybe carried their DEI initiatives a little too far vis-à-vis violating the law, the pendulum has swung back this way.”
In addition to lenders, brokerage firms showed declining diversity in Bisnow’s analysis, with people of color holding 10.92% of the 238 C-suite roles, down from 11.35% last year — and the lowest of the four sectors Bisnow analyzed. Women held 31.51% of C-suite roles, down from 34.93%.
Christopher Okada, an Asian American man who owns brokerage firm Okada & Co., said he doesn’t think large commercial real estate brokerage firms were ever truly committed to diverse hiring practices, even when they were publicly touting their DEI efforts.
“It’s not a top 10 priority,” Okada said. “I don’t think it ever was.”
And since Trump took office, Okada said he has seen those firms pull back on their public-facing DEI efforts. He said people of color and women have an “uneven playing field” at large commercial real estate brokerage firms and that some who feel left out or unhappy may be moving to smaller shops.
“There are many, many ways for them to get in,” he said. “They can work at smaller companies. They can work at large residential firms that have commercial divisions.”
These types of departures of women and people of color, even if they aren’t at the upper level of a company, reduce the diversity of the candidate pool when companies are looking to promote from within for executive roles.
To combat the environment she described as “hostile,” Nash Laird said it is more important than ever for young and midlevel professionals to engage with their communities and network with peers.
“They have to work their way up,” she said. “We hope that people will continue to stay the course, even in an environment that is hostile to them, so that they can achieve those roles.”
