Alicia Glen, founder and managing principal at MSquared
Alicia Glen is leveraging her experience as former deputy mayor of New York Metropolis and head of the City Funding Group at Goldman Sachs to construct MSquared into a big women-owned actual property improvement agency centered on affordable housing. MSquared has raised over $200 million in three years—a feat few girls have achieved.
Reasonably priced housing is a girls’s problem. Girls face larger challenges than males find reasonably priced housing, which impacts their financial safety and well-being. The explanations embrace the gender pay hole, single parenthood, home violence, and homelessness. Offering girls with reasonably priced housing makes them extra more likely to safe steady employment, enhance their total well being outcomes, and provides their kids a greater begin in life.
Glen’s concentrate on bringing extra capital to construct mixed-income and mixed-use initiatives addresses the housing disaster and breaks limitations for girls and minorities within the subject.
Sexism Is Alive And Properly In Actual Property Growth
Girls symbolize greater than 50% of the U.S. adult population. But, in response to Knight Range of Asset Managers Analysis collection, they personal 2.8% of real estate funds and have 1.7% of belongings beneath administration. Companies owned by girls carry out equally in addition to these owned by males.
Whereas it’s heartening that Glen has surpassed $200 million AUM, males with equal expertise would have raised way more. “I understand how exhausting it was for me to lift, however it will have taken my male counterpart two telephone calls,” she mentioned. “In the event you’re a younger girl who’s tremendous good, making an attempt to lift capital, and you do not have the form of long-form resume I’ve, I am unable to even think about how exhausting that’s.”
One in every of Glen’s targets is to encourage different girls and other people of coloration to begin actual property funding funds. She’s not alone. Deborah Harmon and Penny Pritzker started blazing the trail in 2009 once they cofounded Artemis Actual Property Companions and are additionally making an attempt to be function fashions, too.
Analysis in an adjoining sector—enterprise capital—reveals girls and POC face each challenges and alternatives. Restricted companions—institutional traders investing in funds—more and more concentrate on experienced fund managers. Most girls and POC are rising managers. They’re elevating their first three funds. But analysis finds that 72% of top-performing VC funds are rising managers, so girls and POC funds are a great wager.
Women represent 37% of the industrial actual property workforce, in response to the 2020 CREW Community Benchmark Research: Gender and Range in Business Actual Property. Systemic limitations that girls face embrace being paid and promoted much less. These gaps have a cumulative influence on their capacity to launch funds.
“It’s completely astonishing how underrepresented girls are [in real estate fund ownership],” mentioned Glen. “Girls do not management capital, they usually do not construct buildings [in cities].”
After being Deputy Mayor of NYC, Glen took a while off to find out what she would do subsequent.
Thriving Cities Rely On Affordability, Sustainability, And Range
MSquared, Pennrose and the Westminster Financial Growth Initiative are collaborating with The … [+]
Glen grew up on the Higher West Facet, the place there have been public housing initiatives, Mitchell-Lama cooperative housing for moderate- and middle-income households, and brownstones for upper-income households. Everybody went to the identical public faculties, had entry to Central and Riverside parks, and attended after-school actions at Goddard Riverside and Head Begin.
“I grew up in a neighborhood the place I wasn’t afraid of Black and Hispanic folks,” she mentioned. Black, Brown, and white youngsters went to highschool collectively and performed collectively. “I lived on Central Park West, however my mother and father had been public sector staff,” Glen mentioned.
Robust communities are a girls’s problem. The well-being of girls and ladies closely will depend on their entry to protected, reasonably priced, and built-in housing. Sadly, regardless of being the heads of 75% of households that obtain HUD—Division of Housing and City Growth—rental help, just one out of 4 eligible girls will get this help. This disparity leaves thousands and thousands of girls, particularly these from marginalized communities, struggling to safe fundamental shelter for themselves and their households. Guaranteeing truthful entry to reasonably priced and accessible housing is essential in combating financial insecurity amongst girls.
“All people bitches and moans about how there are not any girls in the true property enterprise,” mentioned Glen. So, she determined to place her cash the place her mouth was and launch an actual property improvement and funding platform centered on mixed-income and mixed-use initiatives that promote affordability, sustainability, and variety.
“I’ve devoted my profession to creating cities higher locations to reside. I’ve developed an actual sense of what good cities seem like and what sort of improvement we have to proceed to make them develop and thrive in a manner that makes them various, enjoyable, fascinating, and affluent.”
Glen is set to lift important cash and associate with girls builders. Up to now, MSquared has raised over $200 million. Traders throughout three funds embrace Capricorn Funding Group’s Sustainable Traders Fund, Citibank, Ford Basis, Goldman Sachs, the Skoll Basis, Trinity Church Wall Avenue, and Wells Fargo (WFC).
Like girls searching for enterprise capital, women-owned actual property funds lack entry to institutional traders reminiscent of pension funds, insurance coverage firms, endowment funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, banks, household workplaces, and sovereign wealth funds.
Nevertheless, in contrast to enterprise capital, actual property is a extra capital-intensive enterprise. The homeowners should put in two and a half p.c of the fund. “So you must additionally both have made some cash or be capable to persuade your family and friends to help you,” mentioned Glen. “Girls haven’t got that form of family and friends community.”
A key to Glen’s success is that she is relentless however has a humorousness. “You simply need to maintain going,” mentioned Glen. “You even have to have the ability to have a humorousness, or else you’ll develop into indignant and discouraged.
How will you modify the sport for girls?
