Luxury is a people business: Building a more inclusive, equal and diverse future for real estate

By: Mridul Srivastava 

My first formal training was not in HR. It was in hotel management, and the first thing a hospitality school teaches you is that the guest never sees the organization chart. They see the person in front of them. More than two decades later, leading people at a luxury real estate developer, I find that lesson matters more, not less.

Luxury homes are sold on design, location and finish. They are lived in through people. The relationship manager who guides a family through what may be the largest decision of their lives. The site engineer who decides whether a joint is finished properly when nobody is watching. A luxury product is only as good as the least-heard person who builds or runs it. That is why I see inclusion not as a CSR line, but as a quality standard.

Real estate has no trouble getting women through the door. The trouble is how few are still around when a seat opens up in the boardroom. An industry report this year found that women take 40 to 45 per cent of entry-level roles in several real estate professions yet hold just 1 to 2 per cent of leadership positions.

Somewhere in between, most of them leave.

The graduate from a small-town college, the site worker who has moved from another state and the engineer with a disability face their own versions of the same drop-off. Their numbers are just harder to find.

In my experience across real estate, financial services and manufacturing, people drop out at five points. For each, there is something HR can do.

1. Before the first interview

Imagine a civil engineer who uses a wheelchair arriving for an interview at a site office with three steps at the door. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and its rules require private establishments with 20 or more employees to publish an equal opportunity policy. That policy will not get her up those steps. Accessible application forms, venues and tests will.

Luxury has a bias of its own here: polish. In client-facing roles it is tempting to hire for a certain accent, a metro background, a familiar look. I would rather hire for service instinct and teach the polish

Inside the room, consistency does the work. Same questions, same scoring sheet, and a panel drawn from more than one department. It leaves far less room for gut feel.

2. The appraisal table

Our industry has a bias many others do not, and it is geography. Leaders see the head-office manager every day and the project engineer three hours away far less often. Visibility should not become a rating.

Calibrating ratings across teams before they are final is the simplest check I know. Written promotion criteria, shared openly, do the rest.

Pay deserves the same scrutiny. An annual audit should look at contract type as well as gender, because fixed-term employees must now get the same wages and benefits as permanent staff doing similar work, with gratuity after one year instead of five.

3. The middle years

This is where women's numbers fall off a cliff.  For many people, this stretch coincides with small children, ageing parents, or both.  A role that means leaving at dawn for a site two hours away leaves little room for that. Luxury sales adds its own strain: site visits happen when clients are free, which means evenings and weekends. Rotating weekend duty and team-based selling, where a client relationship does not rest on one person's availability, keep good people in the role. 

Parental leave that fathers can take as well helps share the load at home. The labour codes now allow women to work night shifts with their consent and proper safety arrangements, and provide for crèches, which makes more roles practical.

For people returning after a break, the first months decide everything. Hand someone a full sales target in week one after two years away, and I would not be surprised to see them gone by year end. A few months of lighter work, a refresher, and above all a senior sponsor make the difference. I say sponsor deliberately. A mentor gives advice. A sponsor argues your case when the next big project or promotion is decided.

4. After handover

This is the stage most HR conversations about real estate miss. Once residents move in, the luxury promise is delivered by facility management, concierge, food and beverage and security teams, often employed by partner firms or on company rolls. They are invisible in our HR data, yet residents see them every day.

Our standards should travel into those contracts: fair wages, training, a career path, and basic dignity at work, from proper rest areas to meals. Residents notice how staff are treated, and staff who are treated well treat residents well.

There is a product side to inclusion as well. A resident with a disability needs a step-free entrance and a lift wide enough for a wheelchair. So does the grandparent with bad knees, and so does the parent with a pram. In luxury, this should not be a compliance note at the back of the specification. It is part of what the buyer is paying for: a home that works for the whole family, for decades. Planning for it costs little on the drawing board. Adding it after handover is a different story.

None of this shows up in the numbers within a year, so somebody must keep pushing it long after the launch email has gone. I would ask any leadership team to review five measures every quarter:

1. Retention and promotion rates by gender, at each career stage.

2. Ratings and promotions for site-based versus head-office staff.

3. Pay gaps by gender and by contract type.

4. The share of women in client-facing and site-supervisory roles.

5. Training hours and wage compliance for partner and contract staff.

The question I would put to any leadership team is a simple one. Of the people we hire this year, who will still be with us in 2031, and in what role? If the honest answer does not look like the people who buy, build and look after our homes, we know where to start.