How Sacramento-area real estate veterans are helping homeless women get back on their feet

Iyana Blackwell was looking for a clean slate and a chance to turn her life around in 2018, after beating a drug addiction that she feels likely led to the loss of her job in warehouse management in the Los Angeles area.

“The very instant I got off of the plane (in Sacramento), my mother had let me know to dial 211,” Blackwell said, recalling that her mother told her: “‘211 will let you know all the different resources and all the different programs that will help you get back on your feet.’”

Women’s Empowerment was at the top of the list, she said. The nonprofit boosts the confidence of women who have experienced homelessness and shows them how to build careers that can financially support themselves and their families.

Blackwell now earns $75,000 at a new job she landed this summer, and she says it’s all because Women’s Empowerment connected her with an accomplished group of property managers willing to teach her the ropes in their field.

That group, the Sacramento Valley Chapter of the Institute of Real Estate Management, developed a five-week training course on how succeed in property management and offer them the chance to get to know industry veterans who can help them establish their careers.

“Property management is something that can be overwhelming, and it can be fearful for someone who’s first entering into that type of job and that type of career field,” Blackwell said.

Blackwell was a member of the first class in 2018, and IREM’s latest training session included Sacramento native Shakela Wade, whose journey through homelessness was the subject of a Bee story earlier this year.

“I feel amazing,” said Wade, who graduated in August. “I feel like this train will not stop rolling to success. I’m just so happy to be like the driver. I’m not in the caboose anymore. I’m the driver at this time.”

Removing barriers

The idea for this training program came in 2016 when Julia Cochran, IREM’s executive director, attended an international conference and saw a San Diego chapter of IREM explain how they were giving women escaping domestic violence a start in the real estate industry.

Cochran came back to the Sacramento region and pitched the concept to the IREM board. Real estate companies of all sizes embraced it, she said, and pledged their dollars to help operate it. Many professionals also volunteered their time to teach classes.

Ready to get things rolling in 2018, Cochran wrote the curriculum as IREM Sacramento launched the classes: “Our whole slogan our first year was ‘We’re building the plane while we fly it.’”

They teamed up with Women’s Empowerment, Cochran said, because the nonprofit could recommend women like Wade and Blackwell who had graduated from its job readiness program. Both women were impressed with the seamless coordination between the two groups.

Women’s Empowerment arranged for their grads to take a course in business math, a prerequisite to apply for the IREM program, Cochran said. Once Wade, Blackwell and other candidates passed this course, they still had to undergo a panel interview with several IREM professionals to determine whether they would be a good fit for the program. Wade said Women’s Empowerment had even prepared them for that.

“They remove all barriers,” said Wade, who left a job in shelter intake in San Francisco to return to Sacramento to care for her elderly godmother. When she died, Wade slipped into homelessness, a fate that studies show many caregivers face today.

Members of the program commit to completing the five-week training course that IREM calls the RENEW Program, short for the Real Estate Networking, Education and Work Program, Cochran said. Studies have found that structured learning programs that equip homeless people with specific skills have improved their employment prospects.

While in the program, Blackwell attended lessons five days a week, keeping up with homework and classwork. The course culminated in a 100-question exam at the end, and students must score 80% or higher to pass.

“That would be a challenge for anyone to keep up with, but students in our programs often have extra challenges to overcome,” Cochran said. “How many times have you tried to study where you didn’t have internet access or you didn’t have a computer to get onto this online book that we had provided or to access Google Classroom? How do you study by flashlight if you live in your car?”

Paying it forward

The RENEW Program went virtual for two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting the camaraderie students could build with one another and the networking with the IREM professionals teaching the classes, Cochran said.

That’s improved since 2022, when IREM began offering RENEW classes through a combination of online and in-person instruction.

Paula Nichols, a regional property manager with Cushman & Wakefield and an IREM board member, has served as a mentor in the program as her way to pay forward the help she has received in the industry. She recalled the first letter that IREM received from a RENEW graduate.

“It put me in tears,” Nichols said. “She was sharing with us how thankful she was because it was very difficult for her and her dog Rufus to live under a bridge and attend our class, and she was thanking us for the food.”

A large portion of the budget for this IREM Sacramento program goes to pay for food because Cochran and the board saw firsthand how the students would take a plate of food but eat only a small portion. Then they’d wrap the plate in napkins and tuck it somewhere close to them.

“We went, ‘Oh, my gosh, they have kids, they have families,’” Nichols recalled. “So we pretty quickly morphed that into a very big thing with to-go boxes. There’s so many vendors in this industry that have donated the funding to do that.”

At Wade’s graduation ceremony in August, she and other participants got to keep the laptops they were given to do their class work and gift cards to help defray costs of starting a careers. IREM members agreed to hold mock interviews for students to help prepare them, and Women’s Empowerment founder Lisa Culp said her team would stand ready to help them update their resumes.

Iyana’s journey

Blackwell said she had run through her unemployment benefits and savings by the time she completed the RENEW training. She had stayed at a procession of cheap motels as she went through first the WEAVE job readiness training, the business math course and then RENEW.

Thanks to her mother’s largesse, Blackwell said, she was staying at a two-start extended-stay hotel when she got a call from Renoir Staffing, the temp agency that RENEW instructors had recommended she use to find jobs in property management.

Her first position was just “holding down the fort” at Hotel Berry for a weekend as management of the property shifted. She received a positive review for that stint, and that led to other temporary assignments at Angelina Apartments in South Sacramento, Capitol Yards in midtown, 800J Lofts downtown.

Then Mohanna Development Co. offered her full-time work and a deeply discounted micro-unit where she could stay. Blackwell said she grew to love the cozy efficiency apartment because there was so little space to clean.

Her RENEW training prepared her to handle anything and everything she would face, Blackwell said: They had a course on fair housing from an attorney working in the field. They learned about the different kind of notices that tenants must be served and how to handle deposits. Leasing agents showed them how to tour, lease and keep up a property. There was training on pest control and fire and water restoration.

At graduation, Wade said she wants to remain a part of the solution to homelessness and hopes to put what she learned one day into owning or operating affordable housing for low-income or middle-income people.

As for Blackwell, all the training, temp assignments and full-time positions paid off this summer when she secured a job in the Bay Area, working with residents either seeking public housing or trying to maintain it. There’s plenty of opportunities for advancement, Blackwell said.

“Without RENEW,” Blackwell said, “I would have never gotten the start that I needed and I would have never gotten the direction that I needed. … I am definitely financially stable now.”