Merri Cross wants more opportunities for women brokers

Once upon a time, women were limited to just a few jobs, including nurse, elementary school teacher, secretary and stewardess.
Build a career in commercial real estate? Sorry, that’s a man’s job, many would have said.
Commercial Real Estate Women, a group with chapters across the United States and Canada, is changing that. Merri Cross, who has years of experience in marketing and communication, is president of CREW’s St. Louis chapter of more than 160 members, some of whom are men.

In addition to her involvement with CREW, Cross is a board member of Friends of Kids with Cancer and a trustee of Salem United Methodist Church in Frontenac. Spare time is taken up by reading and playing golf.
“I also never turn down an opportunity to have a bite to eat and a glass of wine,” Cross said. “Or a cold beer. So I call myself somewhat of a foodie, I guess.”
Why and how did you get involved in CREW? I joined Gundaker Commercial Group, and a couple of years into it I was looking for networking opportunities to help grow our brokerage and development and construction presence within the St. Louis area. I got brought to a CREW meeting, and I was kind of hooked. I’ve been a member for more than 10 years. The meetings were a chance for me to interact with partners that we were either doing development work or finance work with and a chance to help my teams within the five divisions of Gundaker Commercial Group.
What should people know about CREW? CREW is a national networking organization for women in commercial real estate. It’s focused on advancing women within the industry. St. Louis is one of the charter chapters for this national organization. It was started in 1982 by a group of women brokers who wanted to do business with each other and were passionate about helping other women in the industry succeed. That national network was formed a few years later.
You mention women wanting to work with other women. Is that a way to crack the old-boy network? I think the old-boy network has changed over the years. There’s a lot more women that are entering the field, and they are taking the opportunity to understand areas that maybe they wouldn’t have gotten into before.
We’re seeing more women brokers come through. Not as many as we’d like but a lot of universities are putting together great commercial real estate programs and finance programs that help young women have an opportunity to enter into some of those more male-dominated fields.
There are still a lot more men in commercial real estate brokerage, but that’s changing. We’re seeing a lot more women at the table than we did before.
How does the St. Louis CREW chapter rank in North America? St. Louis is considered a gold-standard chapter. We are one of the leading chapters helping our other chapters across North America establish their governance plan. They look to us for networking strategies. Our programming is some of the best in the area. We always have the opportunity to get into a new development, to get into a new project coming on. We’re focusing this year on the 250th anniversary of St. Louis. We’ve spent a lot of time downtown, and we’re looking at all of the new developments and recent developments in the region.
What’s the future of women and CREW in the area’s commercial real estate business? We’re definitely seeing an uptick in the industry. We’re seeing movement as far as office leasing, retail leasing. Developers are coming back out. Projects will be coming online. That’s always a good thing for CREW members. I would venture to guess that most of the developments, the new projects coming online, have a CREW member involved in some way. We have a lot of finance-, legal-, brokerage- and development-focused members.
Our numbers are growing every month. We’re approving new applications for CREW members every single month, which tells us that people see the networking is really working for us. We’re receiving referrals from outside our region, from other chapters.
There is an underlying mission that there’s no cold call in CREW. I can literally pick up the phone and call someone in Denver and say, “I need a contact that can help us find a finance partner for one of our CREW members in St. Louis” and we’ll get it done.