PERE America conference

November 11, 2020

The How To of DEI with NAREIM and Belay Investments

How do we look to executing on Inclusion & Diversity strategies? How do we overcome some of the challenges we face? How do we think about our actions? And how do we ensure the actions we take are sustainable – are lasting.

During the PERE America 2020 conference in November 2020, NAREIM CEO Zoe Hughes and Belay Investment partner Eliza Bailey discussed best practices on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for real estate investment managers and how strategies, processes and policies can be enduring and lasting. 

Watch the discussion here.

Key topics include:

• Investor perspectives, attention and what’s driving the call for a focus on DEI

• Is investor attention on DEI about due diligence and understanding manager culture?

• How are managers tackling recruitment and diverse pipeline challenges?

• Blind candidates, blind resumes and removing bias from hiring decisions

• Executing on retention and inclusivity, promoting diversity of thought

• Mentoring 

• Quick wins to take back to the home office, including:

• Devil’s advocate. Introduce an Investment Committee devil’s advocate. Each meeting, one person has to play devil’s advocate and be the contrarian in the room. The role is rotated each committee.

• Preliminary Investment Committee. Departmental heads – such as sustainability, risk, research, investment, portfolio managers and architecture and engineering – have the ability to call a preliminary IC meeting to discuss potential downside scenarios and also recommend measures such as having a maximum hold period. The key is to bring greater risk management into organizational governance and policies, and bring in more of your talent into investment conversations.