In an increasingly competitive and crowded market, CREW (Commercial Real Estate Women) Upstate has created a platform and an infrastructure to help women in the commercial real estate industry succeed. Part networking organization and part educational program, CREW Upstate (a local chapter of the 12,000-member-strong national CREW organization) brings together professionals from every area of commercial real estate to have a stronger voice in the industry.
“There are attorneys, architects, engineers, brokers, there are people that do property management,” says Deborah McDonough, Career Outreach Chair and co-founder of CREW Upstate. “It’s just anybody in any field that has something to do with commercial real estate. That’s what this organization supports.”
CREW Upstate has around 100 members and current CREW president Mareena Register says there’s strength (and a strong referral base) in numbers.
“It’s a male-dominated industry and the whole goal of the organization is to propel women forward in their careers and give them support and resources as they need them,” Register says. “If I want to recommend a banker to one of my clients, I’m looking in my CREW pool of people. If I know that someone needs an architect, I have a list of three or four people that I trust in CREW who are architects. We’re creating an organization where our members have a group of industry professionals they trust for their own projects and for referrals to others.”
The roots of CREW Upstate lie in the recession of the late 2000s, when McDonough and a small group of women saw a need in the local CRE market.
“One of the challenges I’d always found was developing a group of referral sources,” McDonough says. “So another woman at the firm where I was working and I decided that we would use our downtime to try and create relationships with other women. I had a colleague that worked in Charlotte that told me that she’d gone to a meeting with this amazing group called CREW and how they supported women in commercial real estate. There wasn’t anything in the Upstate like that so we joined a group of professional women to put together a task force and in February of 2010, we had our launch event.”
Over the last decade, CREW Upstate has evolved into a powerful networking, educational and referral tool that connects members both locally and globally through the CREW Network organization.
“I can talk with different members and find out so much more about what they’re doing in the commercial real estate space,” Register says, “and I can walk into any event in downtown Greenville and there’s a 95% chance there’s at least one other CREW Upstate member there. We’re trying to develop our membership and become a mainstay in the Greenville community so that when someone is thinking of working on a deal, it’s CREW members that they’re thinking of first.”
To learn more, visit https://crewupstate.org/
