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Spencer Levy
This is how to become a rock star in the real estate business. And because of that, we've assembled a rock star panel of folks to do this. And so we have from my left to right, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, and Madonna.
Spencer Levy (VO)
Commercial real estate has always been an industry about big names: building a network to help you learn the business and make your place in it. On this episode, a front row seat to hear about that from women who are on top of the real estate charts, career advice and business wisdom exclusively for you, our listeners, and the live audience at the Salamander Resort outside D.C. at CBRE’s recent Power of WE event. Our first headliner is Laura Clark, who on the day of our recording was on the eve of a promotion as the COO of Rexford Industrial, a major player in the industrial sector. Here she is to introduce herself with more.
Laura Clark
Rexford is an industrial REIT. We are focused on infill Southern California industrial. We own about 50 million square feet and I couldn't be more excited to be here.
Spencer Levy
Our star studded lineup also includes a pair of leaders from within the CBRE family, including Liz Troni of CBRE Investment Management.
Liz Troni
I'm the Portfolio Manager of CBRE Investment Management's U.S. Core Fund. I've been with CBRE for over five years, and I'm based in New York. Thrilled to be here. Thanks.
Spencer Levy
And finally, CBRE Vice Chair Barbara Perrier, who's been making deals for the firm ever since music’s Material Girl first started making hits.
Barbara Perrier
I have been there 37 years. It's my only job I've ever had, and I like the Madonna reference. There you go. I'm an 80’s girl.
Spencer Levy
Coming up, charting a course of the real estate charts. How to be a real estate rock star at the Power of WE. I'm Spencer Levy, and that's right now on The Weekly Take.
Spencer Levy
So now let's shift to the “how do you become a rock star” portion of today's “how do you become a rock star” panel? How do you become you? What is the key? And just try to focus on one thing. I know there’s 100 things. And we’re going to ask the same question to everybody. Barbara?
Barbara Perrier
So I think as a woman in the business, I don't focus on being a woman in the business. I focus on being the best that I can be in the business. And for me, especially when you started, when you're young, it's just about working hard and always doing the right thing. And I think that you have to always have the mindset that your decisions of how you advise your clients can be contradictory to your pocketbook. And I think women have a lot of empathy and a lot of ability to really understand the problem. And so I feel like if you can always have that thought process of whatever advice I give, it's going to be if the roles were reversed, what would I be telling somebody? And so it's the integrity and it’s doing the right thing.
Spencer Levy
And interesting – be the best, I've heard that. But I've never heard “contrary to your pocketbook”. Go a little deeper than that. What does that mean?
Barbara Perrier
Contrary to your pocketbook. So if you really feel like hey, I'm in the business of selling real estate, but there's many times in this last cycle I've told somebody, do not sell this building. We get the bids in. I'm like, I would not sell at this price. I’d just hold it. And that is contrary to my pocketbook because I will get paid only if I sell that building. But in the long run, if I really felt that that was the right decision, it's the right thing to tell somebody. And so that's really if you live by that principle… and I've seen other people who say stuff and you go, you really got that advice from so and so, that doesn't seem like the right advice. So contrary to your pocketbook.
Spencer Levy
Laura, I'll turn to you now. Same question. How do you become a rock star? But I'm going to go back to the conversation we had at dinner last night talking about a word. And the word we had was balance, and harmony, and trying to live-work balance. And we couldn't agree on a word. Tell us about what that is, what that means, and how that makes you a rock star.
Laura Clark
Great question. Can we just make a pact in this room, and I guess maybe with all of your audience that’s listening to The Weekly Take? I think it's time to get rid of the word and put it on the shelf: Work-life balance. Do I have agreement in the room? Is that consensus, Spencer?
Spencer Levy
I would say that's consensus. Anybody disagree? All right. We'll see that.
Laura Clark
I think that the reason that you heard the clapping, I think that the reason we're all like, please get rid of that term is because it's an unachievable term. There is no such thing as work-life balance. That means that we have an equal division of work and life. And if that's what we're trying to achieve, then we're always going to fail. Right? And I think that we feel that a lot as women. I think that we feel that a lot as individuals, not just women. So I have a new term. We'll see what Spencer thinks about my new term. I did not put this by you today, but I want to call it work-life unity. Work-life unity. So unity is the opposite of being divided, right? And really, what unity means is that both are achievable. And I believe that when we think about work-life balance, and I wrote this down because I just think it's so important as we think about what does work-life unity mean? Unity is about a holistic approach to how we think about work and life. So within this approach to work-life unity, it's about creating intention and purpose in everything that we do. And that allows us to have a presence when we're at work, whether it's engaging with our teams, whether it's driving strategy, whether it's executing our business plans, and allows us to have a presence and intention and a purpose when we're at home, whether it's working on the latest science project, for me, running my next marathon, or what I did Saturday as I'm the head coach of my son's flag football team. But that allows me to create presence, right? And allows me to create intention. And so when I think about this holistic approach and what it really means is that it is achievable to have work-life unity as opposed to work-life balance, which is not achievable. And that we know what unity does. And I've been reading a lot about unity and what does unity mean? And unity allows us to accomplish great things that couldn't be done separately. So if we focus on unity and how we holistically think about work and life, we're going to achieve things we couldn't achieve otherwise.
Spencer Levy
So who's down with unity? Who's down with that word? All right.
Laura Clark
So we're going to change the vocabulary here.
Spencer Levy
There we go. See, that's half the battle. Words matter.
Laura Clark
Words are very important.
Spencer Levy
Liz, so same question. How do you become a rock star, particularly in times like today where I know redemption queues have been an issue and core is hard to get returns when you can't get debt, unless you work with Val, at a good rate. What do you think, Liz?
Liz Troni
It is a great question. And actually I was thinking about this conference and what Spencer may ask us and I walked into Barnes & Noble over the weekend and saw a book called the Likable Badass. And I didn't buy it because I was coming on the trip and didn’t have space to put in my case. But I read the insert and then I read an article by her. She's called Allison, I forget, that’s why I've got the paper up to write her name down, and she basically talks about the pursuit of happiness or in her terms, making work not suck, right? And she describes two pursuits. One is people who pursue power, which is sort of the control of resources. I want a bigger team. I want to control budgets. I want to be able to hire and fire people. And the other is the pursuit, and this is going into words and how words matter, the pursuit of status. And she says when you're pursuing status, it's a basic human need, and status isn't the car or the watch or the purse. It's being respected by others. And this really resonated with me. And she said, to pursue status, you need to do two things. You need to be competent and you need to be caring. And lean into whichever is natural to you and then sort of put layers on whichever of those two isn't as natural, and build up some unity of those two. And I thought about that a lot over the weekend and to me that's what's resonated and hopefully what's made not only work not suck, but on good days I'm thriving and on other days you're surviving. And maybe we'll get to talk more about that.
Spencer Levy
Excellent. Well, you know, Laura, I’ve got to say, I'm a big fan of the word unity, but likable badass is pretty cool.
Laura Clark
I 100% agree. Yeah. I wrote that one down. I'm going to read that book.
Spencer Levy
Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So we've got some great words up here.
Laura Clark
Can I add another word to that?
Spencer Levy
Absolutely. This is the word moment.
Laura Clark
Yeah, lots of words. I love what you said because I think part of being a rock star, it's all about your mindset. And Barbara mentioned mindset earlier and it's about having a growth mindset. And what does that mean? That means that there's nothing that’s not possible. And I would say that throughout my career, and I'm sure women on the stage could say the same thing; we never had that obstacle in place in front of us, that fixed mindset that was like, goodness, I can't do this or, you know, my future's etched in stone. That was completely the different mindset. It's how can I seek challenges? How can I take on as many responsibilities as I can? There's nothing that's not possible. And I can tell you that I'm sure that we all still live that today. And I think that that mindset and having that nothing is impossible and literally stepping up, making your seat at the table, taking on responsibilities, even if sometimes you don't know what on earth you're taking on. But you go figure it out because nothing's impossible. I have a funny story. Can I tell a story?
Spencer Levy
Funny stories are welcome.
Laura Clark
So I was in a prior role. It was an investor relations and capital markets role at a prior firm. And I was in Europe and I was meeting with investors. We were in Amsterdam and we're driving around and this is 7 or 8 years ago. And we were getting a lot of questions about ESG. Well, we know that our European colleagues are way in ahead of us when it comes to ESG. So we were driving around and getting lots of questions, and we didn't… at this point in time in the U.S., there weren't a lot of ESG reports, especially in real estate. And I looked over at our CFO and I said, we need to get one of those ESG reports. And she said, that sounds great. You should go figure that out. Well, I didn't know a darn thing about ESG, what an ESG report was, all of the alphabet soup of ESG. And I said, okay, I'll do that. Well, what did I do? I went and figured it out. I obviously got lots of advice and consulting, did a lot of reading, and then became one of the experts in ESG. Fast forward several years. I was on ESG panels, have built successful ESG platforms at two companies now. But that was because I raised my hand. And that's because I said nothing is impossible. Seeking challenges, I think, is so important as we think about our mindsets.
Spencer Levy
And getting into areas where you may not be an expert, but you want to be that expert, particularly in an emerging sector like ESG.
Barbara Perrier
I don't know if everybody knows why we called this the Power of WE, but it's Women Excelling. That's what “We” stands for. And I think that what's so great is we have a room of people here who have all excelled. And you're here in this room because you're a leader. And so when you think of what Laura said is, we don't take no for an answer and there's no challenge too big. And one of the reasons why Darla and I are both where we are in our careers is that our father, interestingly, not so much our mother, who was a homemaker. Our father used to say there is no difference between men and women. And we didn't question what your dad said. Your father knows best. And so he's like, you know, industrial real estate is an excellent profession for women. This was 40 years ago and there was no women in industrial real estate. He just said–and so Darla’s like, okay, father knows best. And then I followed her footsteps. But it's funny because we didn't know there was an obstacle in this business because our dad told us there wasn't. So we just listened and proceeded.
Spencer Levy
Well this goes right back to what you said before, Barbara, about being the best period. There's no caveat on that, right? And seeing the world that way. But notwithstanding that being the best, Barbara, you've tried new challenges where you weren't the best, but you're going to try to be the best. And I'll just use golf as an example. I've been on the golf course with you at Pelican Hill, and Barbara has gotten a lot better. I mean, really good. So I'm proud of that. But why? But why? A challenge that's new. I know it's fun, but there is a business story there, too, isn't there? Because of how people use these social interactions as a means to do things.
Barbara Perrier
Well, so the one thing about golf is it's a really challenging game and you can't get frustrated, right? You’ve just got to try the best you can. But I was not going to be out on the golf course and not playing golf, so I just had to learn it. Like I just had to do it and never say no. It is hard because it takes a lot of time. And so that balancing, that's the tough thing. It’s like, how do you play golf and work and have children and do all these things? So you just have to go, I'm not going to be the best, but I'm going to be proficient at golf.
Spencer Levy
You're better than that, Barbara. I've played with you many times.
Laura Clark
Yeah. I think you're more than proficient at golf. Yes.
Spencer Levy
So how do women deal with work from home? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing?
Liz Troni
I think it's a great question, but it's been, in my view, a leveler. I was frankly concerned at the start, if you go back to the status. This idea of being respected and as a female wanting to have both the competency and the caring, that the at-home would set us back to that sort of instinctive, backward step that women have. I think when we're first assessed and in terms of status, it's a demographic factor, right? She's a female and the evidence tells us that's a negative versus a male. You can quickly surmount that with actions. But I was concerned that being at home or that sort of retreat during Covid to that environment would set us further back and that you'd have to compensate additionally for proving that you're competent, you're not actually doing household chores, or shopping, or at the mall, when you were working from home. And it really concerned me at the start. But I think we've overcome that. And it has been a leveler because both genders participate in both, and both can see the benefits and challenges to it. So I've been optimistic about it and I don't think it set us back from status, and I don't think it's made us air on the side of too caring, and being the one that optically is seen to be at home doing household chores were in my perspective, maybe it's optimistic, but I think it's leveled things a lot.
Spencer Levy
So Laura, you’re a living, breathing example of how flexibility, or unity, or likable badass… you're able to do so much. You're not just one of the most senior people at one of the largest industrial firms in the world. You're the coach of your children's football team. You're a marathon runner, ran the New York City Marathon last weekend. Good thing or a bad thing post-Covid? More flexibility versus less.
Laura Clark
So I'd say that at Rexford we've taken a bit of a different approach than some to thinking about the workplace post-Covid. So we actually have 100% hybrid workplace. And what does that mean? We do not require our teams to come into the office any number of days a week. And we won't change that. I know that there's been a lot of companies that are evolving that. And the reason is why. Why is because we want to be able to create this work-life unity for those. But we also believe that the workplace does not drive engagement. That doesn't drive relationships. Purposeful engagement, purposeful opportunities to drive relationships, to drive learning, to drive development opportunities, can happen way outside of the office environment. But it's about how you curate those opportunities. At Rexford, we have a lot of social groups. I think we have something like 26 Employee Forum social groups. We have tremendous amount of learning opportunities in our markets, on sites. Our teams cross collaborate in ways that I do not believe that they would have cross collaborated and built relationships if we were just in the office. And so I think this year alone we're at something like 80 plus events that we have hosted, either volunteering in our community, learning opportunities, but we create these opportunities to drive purposeful engagement with our teams. And so that's what our focus has been on, and that has allowed our teams to be able to have that work-life unity and be able to be that employee that they want to be. And I will tell you, our retention rates are extraordinarily high. Our teams are very focused, very loyal. They work extremely hard because they value this opportunity and this flexibility. And I believe the relationships that they're driving are truly making a difference in terms of the long term success of Rexford.
Spencer Levy
So, Barbara, let's turn now to mentoring. And the bottom line is mentoring is a two way street. And I'll talk about the story we had recently, Barbara, where I was doing a public speaking training class in Newport Beach, and I said, give the client all the best information up front the day before, the price of the asset, the cost of our services, and you're like, no way. And I thought about that and I was like, maybe I'm wrong. And it was such an effective comment, not only because it was a two way street, but you challenged me and you made me better. That's what I think mentoring is. How do you see it, Barbara?
Barbara Perrier
So what’s interesting as you look at mentoring… First of all, I gained probably more being a mentor than, you know, on the mentoring side because you start to stop and think and listen and listen to your own advice. But there's been some really important mentors in my life. Chris Ludeman, I would say, has been probably the most pivotal and another just fabulous colleague where he stood up for me with a client who was a woman who said, did you put this woman on the team because you think I like women? And Chris is like, no, I put this woman on the team because she is the best young professional we have in the organization. And it's funny because I was like, wow, this woman doesn't want a woman. This was back in the day, right, when women weren't promoting other women. And he stood up for me and got that business and changed my career. So, you look back at times of pivotal moments and people who've really changed your career, and unfortunately for me, most of those have been men because I didn't have that many female role models growing up in this business. And so now I feel like it's our kind of duty and our gift is to give it back to the next generation. So I know everybody probably on this panel spends a lot of time mentoring women because we want to see women excelling. And the mentality 30-something years ago wasn't quite that way.
Laura Clark
I think throughout your career, how you utilize mentors evolves. But I actually like to take the approach of, I think informal mentoring can even be more powerful. While mentors can make these big shifts in our career. I actually think some of the feedback that you can get throughout your career can have an even larger impact. Let me give you an example of that. One of the things that I have always lived by is without feedback, I can't grow. So I ask everybody all the time, how could I have done that better? Give me 2 or 3 ways that you think that I could have improved in that meeting or in that negotiation. And I still to this day do it all the time. What could I do better here? How you ask the questions is really important. You, number one, need to ask someone that you trust, that you respect. Secondly, if you ask someone, how did that meeting go, nine times out of ten, they're going to go “good.” Because, by the way, giving feedback isn't super comfortable. So you've got to open it up. Make people comfortable in giving the feedback. So one of the things I'll say is, can you give me 2 or 3 things that you think I could have done better than this meeting, 2 or 3 things I could have done better in this negotiation. Now it's a safe place. And pieces of feedback that I have gotten from asking that question have no doubt changed my career.
Liz Troni
Yeah, I keep going back to the likable badass definition of status, and competence versus caring. And I like to think that on the caring side, so as a natural empath, I actually am empathetic. I lean towards that. So I have to almost overcompensate with competence and actions of competence. But on those moments of empathy and caring, those micro-moments are where I hope I'm acting as a mentor, even if it's not in a structured mentoring program. They’re seeing actions that are caring, that deliver with respect. And Spencer, we were talking before we got on. I grew up–my mother never–you know that expression “never no as a stranger?” She would talk to everyone in line in the supermarket and they would become her best friend before we had checked out. And just thinking, you know, about respect at all levels: not high up, not sideways. Just not seeing that and acting with respect to everyone is something I hope I really put at the forefront of every day. And those micro-moments hopefully act as mentorship even if it's not structured.
Spencer Levy
Barbara, we talked about where we are and we are not where we need to be. Where would you like us to be as an industry, women in the industry, women rock stars in our industry, ten years from now?
Barbara Perrier
Well, we're still behind as far as women versus men. But I think by the looks of this room and the people that we've seen and the size of our women's network, we're making good ground. But I'd like to be more 50/50, where we're equal. I think that it's interesting about challenging the status quo, and I'm reading the Elon Musk book. And if there's anybody who thinks differently and challenging that status quo… I wasn't a huge Elon Musk fan, but reading this book gives me a sense that he's a modern day genius. And it's really fascinating to me to hear somebody who just thinks differently. But this book has just made me think that's what we need to do. We need to challenge the status quo as women and in just everything that we do just to make sure we make gains.
Spencer Levy
Well, we're out of time. And I want to thank everybody in this audience for joining The Weekly Take Live. And let's hear it for our terrific panelists in today's Weekly Take Live presentation.
Spencer Levy (VO)
Bravo to our rock star panelists Laura Clark, Liz Troni, and Barbara Perrier, and to the CBRE Women's Network for handing us the mic at The Power of WE. And speaking of handing off the mic, we're already looking ahead to a new season and want to hear what's on your mind for the year ahead. As we get ready to record our upcoming outlook for 2025, we invite you to share questions via our home page using the Talk to Us button at CBRE.com/TheWeeklyTake. You can also share questions by posting a comment on the podcasting platform of your choice, and feel free to drop us a line wherever you follow the show. We've only got a couple more episodes left for this year and we look forward to a strong finish for 2024. That includes more from our series on forward thinking places, Shaping Tomorrow's Cities, and also our season-ending retrospective, in which we will review the year with highlights and exclusive outtakes as well. For now, thanks for joining us. I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.
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