The Diverse Developers Conference
Welcomes You!
We aim to foster collaboration between the diverse real estate developers in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and other midwestern states and leverage resources to offer technical assistance and dealmaking for real estate developers.
Who should attend? Commercial real estate professionals and policy and educational professionals from diverse and underrepresented populations in commercial real estate.
Where does it take place? We host an annual conference in addition to other programming throughout the year and we hope you will join us!
Our next event will be held on January 25th 2024. You can learn more about this event by clicking the flyer below - the agenda will be announced soon. We hope to see you there!
Invest in your yourself
We aim to leverage resources amongst the regional ecosystem supporting diverse developers to offer education, technical assistance, solve challenges, and continue to build communities.
Build new relationships with others
We plan to create dealmaking between diverse and underrepresented real estate developers and commercial real estate professionals across the midwestern states.
Target Audience:
Developers from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds
Diverse commercial real estate professionals, including those in commercial real estate brokerage, architecture, property managers, finance, and other related fields such as housing agencies.
Professionals in policy, university administrators, financial institution professionals, non-profits, and general contractors will also benefit from discussions on best practices and solutions to support developers across the industry.
Event Concept & Need:
In April 2022, the first two planning committee members, Katrina Malone (17 Asset Management) and Matthew Paschall (Baker Tilly) met to discuss the challenges and support systems for developers in Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other Midwest cities. They recognized the need to build a better support system for those developers to scale. Katrina partnered with Ashley Besic as a Conference Co-Founder (Building Decarbonization Coalition) to plan Chicago’s Inaugural Diverse Developer Conference to engage developers of color to network, build capacity and strategize around current issues that impact the commercial real estate industry. Other planning committee members include Ciere Boatright (CRG), Collete English Dixon (Roosevelt University), Ariam Kesete (AK Development), Heather McGee (17 Asset Management), and Dr. William Towns (University of Chicago & Gorman & Co).
About us:
To ensure our communities can flourish for all, building capacity for those typically underrepresented in l real estate development is important. These nontraditional professionals typically serve the most disenfranchised communities in our communities. And so, a group of commercial real estate and finance professionals with diverse industry and real estate experience have come together to establish an annual convening where underrepresented real estate developers from Illinois, Wisconsin, and across the Midwest states can gather and exchange knowledge and resources. By creating annual conferences, classes, webinars, and more, we aim to enhance the regional ecosystem by establishing a network that promotes dealmaking for underrepresented groups in the real estate industry.
