Rethink Real Estate. For Good.

Equity

Real estate and women.

Eve and her sister Michelle on site at their 15-unit project in Melbourne, Australia.

Thank you, Colette Coleman, for laying bare the facts about women in real estate development.

In her New York Times article, Female Developers Navigate Discrimination in a Male-Dominated Field, Colette shares the data behind and the reality of being a woman in real estate. “Women own just 2.8 percent of real estate firms and occupy 9 percent of the C-suite in commercial real estate” says Colette. And stories by four women developers, Anna Mackay, Alicia Hylton-Daniel, Jennifer Haskamp and Anyeley Hallová, back this up.

I’ve gathered my own binder full of stories in my decades as a real estate developer, just like they have. Surely, I thought, if we develop excellent projects, soon we’ll be embraced as excellent real estate developers well worth investing in? But we’ve barely moved one inch in the past 20 years (or perhaps longer) towards gender equity, except that now we have data (and writers like Colette) to show where things really stand.

Can we ever dig ourselves out of this hole?

Bellevue Montgomery

✅ Missing Middle housing.  23 townhomes, duplex + 4-plex units

✅ Affordable.  Rents planned at 80% AMI

✅ Additional phases.  For a total of 67 units months construction period

✅  Underway.  Purchase + sale agreement executeduction commencement

✅ Cost.  $3.6M total project costing, dining and at least 3 parks

✅ Deferred real estate taxes.  Project awarded a 10-year PILOT, 75% deferral

✅ Completion.  Q1 2026 anticipated completion for Phase 1aces

A pocket neighborhood adjacent to Memphis Medical District.

Bellevue Montgomery is a multifamily project planned as an infill project in Midtown Memphis, Tennessee, adjacent to the Memphis Medical District. Even at the convergence of Downtown, Crosstown, and Midtown, the neighborhood does not have sufficient housing to fill the need for affordable housing. The Company intends to address this gap in the Medical District with much-needed “Missing Middle” housing. They’re looking for investors small and big alike, just like you, on Small Change. 

https://www.smallchange.co/projects/bellevue-montgomery

This is not a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any securities. All investing is risky and involves the risk of total loss as well as liquidity risk. Past returns do not guarantee future returns. If you are interested in investing, please visit Small Change to obtain the relevant offering documents.

Image courtesy of Bellevue Montgomery

The case for social housing.

The opera and apple strudel are the hottest tickets in Vienna these days, right?

Wrong!  US natives are invading the Austrian capital to take a look at their social housing projects.  Hordes of politicians, housing advocates and journalists tromping the cobblestones, trying to understand how housing can be more than just a profit center, and probably eating a little apple strudel on the side.  It’s part of the culture.

What’s special about these housing projects?  Through cross-subsidization they offer high-quality housing to everyone.  Rent is based on income with high income earners subsidizing low income earners.  Rent can be as low as 4% of income.

Equal opportunity for everyone. 

Fast Company asks, “Will the U.S. ever embrace social housing?” And we wonder too. The housing market is driven by profit here.  What happens when non-profit projects really start to compete?

From $124,000 to $350,000.

Maybe this is not super big news to you, but it is to me.

In plain English, there’s a recommendation on the table that if approved by the SEC, will permit small businesses to raise up to $350,000 without the burdensome financial review requirements that currently exist.

This promises to be a momentous change for the small-scale developers who come to my SmallChange.co platform seeking to raise a little capital from friends and family, neighbors and enthusiasts. It will simplify and speed up the process for them AND reduce their costs.

And all of this inches us towards a more level playing field, making it a little simpler for small, women and minority developers to get a foothold in the very un-level landscape of real estate development.

A big thank you to the SEC Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee for pushing this forward. Here’s their recommendation.

Small tranches.

It’s not efficient to finance a $430 million project with small tranches of capital. And yet Small Change is.

In early April 2024, Small Change, launched an investment opportunity into 22 Drydock Avenue in Boston’s Seaport district. The property is slated to be the city’s first life sciences building to achieve LEED Platinum and net-zero carbon emissions and has very lofty DEI goals.

Related Companies (led by a woman) was selected a few years ago by the City of Boston to develop 22 Drydock, an R & D building to be fully occupied by Vertex Pharmaceuticals (led by a woman). And Boston Real Estate Inclusion Fund (BREIF), negotiated a small position ($3.75 million) in the $130 million equity stack required for the project.

Put another way, they further diversified the capital stack from a single, big, diverse investor to now include multiple investors—over 40 women and people of color. While the offering is not exclusively available to that group, BREIF is using its network to target diverse capital.

This is an opportunity to invest alongside the big boys. While (disappointingly) it is not open to non-accredited investors (you can take that up with the SEC), it is a very big step forward to providing opportunity where normally there is none.

Read the Q & A here. But be quick. BREIF is closing in rapidly on it’s maximum funding goal.

Image courtesy of BREIF