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Breaking into the Building Business Three Success Stories From Women Developers by Ellen Hastings

It is probably no surprise to you that builders and real estate developers are still predominantly men, but women are finally finding success in the field. The stakes can be high, with a lot of money to make (or lose), and it seems best suited to those willing to take charge and take risks. It combines financial savvy with engineering and architecture. And while knowing how to swing a hammer is a plus, strong communication, project management and people skills are a must.

Maria Barrientos, Martha Rose and Anne Michelson are three Seattle women with projects in development. They also have three different backgrounds and approaches to their work. Barrientos comes from a marketing and project management background, while Rose’s résumé includes stints in the building trades and as a city building inspector, as well as a project manager. Michelson is an entrepreneur and passionate neighborhood activist.

Maria Barrientos, the more traditional developer of the three, has had her own firm (Barrientos, LLC) for 10 years and employs seven people full-time. With four current projects in the works, her focus is on mixed-use buildings in the Capitol Hill, Queen Anne and Eastlake neighborhoods. She does both new construction and renovation. At 12th and Pine on Capitol Hill, she’s adding two floors of apartments above a one-story building zoned for commercial space while striving to fuse historic with contemporary architectural styles.

Barrientos has a degree in marketing and advertising, but she found her calling in her first job as an assistant project manager for a developer. Originally from South Texas, she moved to Seattle in 1988 and went to work for Lorig Associates, where she stayed for 10 years, moving up to partner and president before deciding to launch her own company.

Female project managers were a rarity when Barrientos began, but now she figures about half are women. Three of the five project managers she hired are women, and although she didn’t set out to employ women, she acknowledges it “might have been a subconscious choice.”

Barrientos’ company has grown to the point that she is now consumed with overseeing the company as a whole: having the vision, finding the property, figuring out the financing, working with the neighborhood, putting the design together and making it work. She prefers to build in established neighborhoods. “I really believe when you build a building in an existing neighborhood you impact that neighborhood in a huge way, and you’re going to impact them for the next 50 years. So you have to be very thoughtful about what it is you’re doing to both keep and enhance the neighborhood — not to detract from it.”

Barrientos makes good use of her marketing background. A huge amount of research goes into every project before any property is purchased. The company studies the area’s demographics and who is likely to move there.

A real estate degree, now offered at the University of Washington, and an education in finance can pave the way for a career as a developer. But even better, says Barrientos, is technical training in architecture and engineering. Some of her best project managers have come from these fields.

Established and respected as a developer, Barrientos doesn’t run into a lot of sexist attitudes professionally, but she acknowledges that a woman starting out in the business today is still likely to have to prove herself before she’s taken seriously by her male peers. “There is a credibility gap you need to overcome,” she explains.

Barrientos observes that there are many qualities more associated with women that are beneficial to the building process. “Men often make decisions based on winning or being right, whereas women are more focused on what we are trying to achieve.” Women also tend to be collaborative and more willing to ask questions, she says.

Reflecting on her own success, Barrientos observes, “I’m a very strong-willed person. I have a lot of drive. I don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. I’m Hispanic and I’m a woman. If I’d taken ‘no’ for an answer, I guarantee you I wouldn’t be anywhere.”

Martha Rose is another woman who learned early on not to take ‘no’ for an answer. Her favorite subjects in high school were math and science, and although she assumed she’d pursue those interests in college, she found a career without the additional schooling. A friend’s advice to “pick something that will pay a man’s wage, and pick something you can do anywhere,” combined with her desire to work with her hands, gave Rose, at 19, the courage to venture onto a construction site in the Washington, D.C. area in the early ’70s. Her timing was good; construction of the new subway in the area created a shortage of construction workers for other projects. Additionally, lawsuits resulting from women being denied subway construction jobs were making the headlines. Still, she had to hustle to land her first job building a 200-unit townhouse.

Rose worked as a laborer for about a week, then became a carpenter’s helper handling the stocking of millwork, and was eventually promoted to installing shoe molding, hardware and doorknobs, and setting bathroom cabinets. Given little or no direction, she was left to trial and error before picking up a few tips now and then from colleagues.

It was a willingness to ask for help, Rose says, that gained her skills faster than many of her male counterparts. “Because I knew zero, it would have been hard to fake it, and I wasn’t ashamed to say I didn’t know…Guys were afraid to admit they didn’t know how to do things.” After working the project for six months, she quit when the raise she believed she deserved was denied. Construction jobs were still abundant and she was able to change jobs about every six months, holding four jobs in two years. But in the spring of 1975, a moratorium on building was declared in Washington, D.C.

Rose decided to move to the Pacific Northwest. She spent three years in Portland working construction despite resistance because of her sex. She was usually the only woman on the site and there was a lot of harassment along the way. She remembers being told, “If I hire you, all my guys would quit.” However, she was able to learn more skills, including how to pour foundations, during her time in Portland.

In 1978, Rose left Portland to start her own subcontracting business in Grays Harbor. Five years later, a job on the West Seattle Bridge construction project brought her here. It was the hardest and most frightening work she’d done — and it was the first time she’d worked side by side with another woman and experienced the camaraderie she’d seen her male counterparts enjoy.

After working six months on the bridge, Rose was hired as a building inspector for the City of Seattle, a position she held for four years before going it on her own again as a licensed contractor. She worked as a freelance project manager overseeing small commercial projects, apartments and houses for the next 10 years. During that time she came to know a lot of builders and, eventually, she became one herself.

Most of Rose’s own projects were homes, but her exposure to the durable goods used on commercial-grade projects inspired her to introduce that level of sustainability into her single-family projects. She’d worked on building passive solar houses in Grays Harbor and was involved in organizing two alternative energy fairs. That was in the aftermath of the 1970s energy crisis and during the era of nuclear power plant protests and heightened environmental awareness that supported government incentives for environmental building practices. Those incentives disappeared in the ’80s when energy became cheap again, and it wasn’t until about five years ago when the movement toward green construction emerged that Rose fully embraced it in her work.

She remembers hearing Lynne Barker, who had been hired by the city to encourage green building, speak at a Seattle Council of Master Builders meeting. Rose was immediately determined to be involved, and volunteered to help with a design competition around the “built green” concepts the council was advocating. She gave up that role, however, when she realized it was a competition she really wanted to enter. She won the design competition in 2005 with a small mixed-use building and has gone on to win several other awards, including the 2006 Built Green Hammer Award, the 2007 Master Builder Built Green Pioneer Award, the 2007 Energy Star Small Home Builder Award and the 2008 HomeStreet Bank Good Business Person Award.

Her current project in Shoreline at 157th and Greenwood is a residential site of four homes. Three are new green construction, and the fourth is an original farmhouse on the property, restored and upgraded to built-green standards. The homes are energy-conservative from top to bottom, capturing natural light and incorporating alternative power, preserving the natural landscaping, employing high-efficiency energy and water systems, and using local, durable and nontoxic materials.

Rose is passionate and clearly proud of her work. But the challenge of being ahead of the curve is that she has to invest time educating the public and her prospective buyers on the long-term value of these new systems (which can be more expensive to build and install) that have become the signature of her business.

There are opportunities for women in most of the building trades, and especially in union jobs and the commercial sector. The residential sector is a tougher nut to crack, she concedes, yet her success proves it can be done.

A preservationist at heart, Anne Michelson is the most unlikely developer of the three. Her focus has been on maintaining the fringe theater warehouse district of Capitol Hill, around Pike Street between 12th and Broadway. Since 1989 she has acquired three turn-of-the-century commercial and mixed-use buildings with the goal of restoring them. She has watched with sadness as old buildings have been demolished to make way for new ones, changing the dynamics and demographics of the neighborhood. Maintaining affordability to keep artists in the area is a big part of her mission.

A Seattle native who grew up on Queen Anne Hill, Michelson always liked Capitol Hill, as it spoke more to her hippie self. She attended the University of Washington and Washington State University, and has a degree in English. Her love of mountains and hiking led her to work for Eddie Bauer in 1969 setting up their quality control department testing down and fabric. That was also the year she moved to Capitol Hill, where she’s been ever since.

She worked on and off for Eddie Bauer for a few years before deciding to start her own small clothing business called Crescent Down Works. It has always been a low-key business centered on solid pieces and high quality. Her focus has been about doing work she loves rather than making a lot of money, and she admits she’s never had a business plan. “If there’s money in it, that’s always been a bonus. A lot of it has been really lucky.” The garment business was touch-and-go for many years, but she has found a strong following for her label in Japan and Europe.

Though clothing has been her main business over the years, Michelson has always liked old houses and buildings. In the early ’80s, she and her husband at the time gradually renovated two older homes on Capitol Hill. They hired out some of the work and did the rest themselves. Michelson bought her first building on Capitol Hill in 1989, financing it with equity in her home and an inheritance. Formerly a tool store when Capitol Hill was known as Auto Row, the building became home to a beatnik coffeehouse called Café Paradiso. Michelson sold it to Caffé Vita in 1998.

In 1997, Michelson purchased a 36,000-square-foot warehouse to preserve. She was not concerned with profit up front, but just needed to be sure she could cover her mortgage. She bought her next building in 2000, an apartment building with the Wild Rose Tavern on the street level. She managed to finance these buildings by leveraging the equity she had built and creating a strong relationship with her local bank.

Her current project, at 11th and E. Pike, is completely new territory for her since it involves new construction of 27 condominium units with commercial space on the street level. Her intention when she bought the two vacant lots (after fire destroyed the original building), was to preserve them as open space in the form of much needed parking lots. Since zoning prohibited that use and she couldn’t afford to leave it empty, her solution was to hire the best architect she could find and focus on providing the most affordable and artistic spaces possible.

The condos are mostly studios and one-bedroom, but there are three penthouse units as well. Pricing is targeted between $300,000 and $500,000, which is considered affordable by Capitol Hill standards. If everything goes according to plan, they should be on the market by September.

To pull this project together, Michelson has hired a whole team, including renowned architect Tom Kundig. “He’s a cool guy who does cool things,” she says, noting that his contemporary designs reflect the warehouse history of the area as well as its artistic sensibilities. It is Kundig’s first condo project, but Michelson explains that he was interested in entering the mixed-use urban infill market and wanted to design for regular people. “He liked that I’m not just out for the money.”

Ellen Hastings is a writer and real estate agent who lives in Seattle.

©2008 Caliope Publishing Company