Connaé Pisani // Courtesy photo

NATIONAL REAL ESTATE MANAGEMENT GROUP: After several years working in the oil industry in Texas, metro Detroit native Connaé Pisani wanted to drill into a completely different field: commercial real estate in her hometown. The 32-year-old University of Michigan graduate fled Houston and founded National Real Estate Management Group in 2018, a commercial real estate firm with a small $12 million portfolio consisting of more than 100 multifamily, commercial and single-family properties. The company does property management, brokerage, construction and investment management.

Crain’s Detroit Business: Fill us in on your background and how you moved from the oil industry into commercial real estate.

Pisani: I started off in engineering. My background is civil engineering and I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2009 at the height of the economic crisis, which then led to my first job having me relocate across the country, working in the oil industry in Texas. From there, I was jumping from job to job within the same company, working on different projects in the oil industry, and then transitioning to the construction industry, which was more closely related to my major, which is construction management. I worked for Bechtel Corp. for many years before returning back to Michigan in 2018.

We have a once-in-a-century pandemic happening right now. Given the scope of your portfolio and the range of asset classes and the types of work that you do, how has that trickled down to your day to day?

One of the greatest blessings has been establishing a strong presence remotely prior to the pandemic, so we didn’t have to do too much pivoting to remain in place. Our staff is trained on how we operate from day No. 1. So, thankfully, we didn’t have a huge learning curve there.

In terms of any physical interactions with our clients, that’s come to a near standstill since we’re not doing anything that will put our employees or our tenants in harm’s way. For example, construction and maintenance is basically on a complete hold. We just have a skeleton crew right now that is doing any emergency maintenance repairs to make sure that our tenants are well taken care of.

Our property management arm is still operational at full capacity, thankfully. And we’re still able to answer any phone calls, follow up via email, and really still have the same presence that we did prior to the pandemic.

Any brokerage sales and transactions are kind of at a standstill at this time since we can’t go out and show properties. But I can honestly say that having such a diverse portfolio and several different versions of the company has really been a huge blessing, and I’m really thankful that is established in that perspective because if we focused more heavily on one arm as opposed to the other, we might be out of business right now

What has this done to your revenue stream?

We’re split up into four different ones, so construction management and renovation projects, property management, the brokerage and then any investment strategy development. For those four components, let’s just say there’s 25 percent that each business is comprised, I’d say 75 percent is on hold right now. And we just have to 25 percent for property management, that’s still ongoing.

Tell us a little bit about the experience of being a woman and person of color in commercial real estate, an industry that’s long been dominated by white men.

That’s one I’m really passionate about. I’d start from the beginning, which is having a background in engineering as a woman is very rare. It’s becoming more popular, but especially when I was in college, the number of women to men was significantly lower. And then if you also put into perspective, the number of minority women to men in general is even a smaller population.

In the workforce as well. You go from a company that has tens of thousands of employees, and then you scale that down to, you know, the specific project you’re working on, there was oftentimes a situation where I would see myself being the only minority woman, black woman, in a meeting with several older white males. But honestly, I learned to navigate that scenario, and I’ve had a lot of support and a lot of respect given to me being that they see that I’m not just about the fact that I’m a woman and I want women’s rights, but I’m actually am skilled and I understand what I’m doing. And regardless of what I might look like, or what my socioeconomic background might be, I’m a valuable asset to the company.

So then, when starting up my own company, especially a construction company, the initial perspective was, “Who is she and what does she think she’s doing?” But in turn in working with me, my staff has nothing but positive things to say about me and I’ve really earned the respect. I think that’s one of the key words. Sometimes I’m in a position where I have to earn that respect.

Even among my clients, an investment market is typically an older demographic of people that have financial security and they want to make sure I understand what I’m doing, especially when it comes down to managing their investments, whether that’s large-scale construction projects or multi-million dollar buildings. They want to make sure that they’re in the right hands. So there’s a lot of reputation building that I have to do in certain situations, but honestly, I can say that after I’ve crossed that hurdle, I’ve had positive feedback from my clients and they say that it’s been a good experience.

From your vantage point, is there more that can be done to encourage not only more women but women of color to enter into the commercial real estate industry?

It’s one of those situations where real estate is built on who knows who, and what relationships have been built prior to network, have a good reputation and knock down those barriers. In my case, I have an engineering degree, I went to UM, so I feel like I have established the credibility. I think having a strong supportive network of other women who are trying to cross similar paths is also helpful.