Alicia Chidsey, Director of CBRE’s partnership with T-Mobile
Alicia Chidsey began her professional career as a lawyer, in which she is classically trained and educated, and maintains that status today. For the last, almost 30 years however, she has been working in some form of Real Estate. She began her career at CBRE as a negotiator - negotiating Real Estate contracts, spent five years doing Sustainability and Energy, and has also been involved in strategy work. Currently, she is the Alliance Director for the T-Mobile account, which she’s held for the past five years.
World-Class Status
Asked what CBRE wants to achieve for its future, Chidsey says, “Internally, a lot of folks have heard our CEO, Bob Sulentic, talk about achieving ‘world-class status’, which really means, that it's a very simple mission that we have; and that is to be consistently great, and to be world-class at the services that we offer to our clients.”
CBRE's approach to renewable energy and alternative fuels
CBRE has some crucial Carbon Neutral goals. “We recently announced our commitment to achieve Net-Zero Carbon Emissions by 2040,” says Chidsey, “and that encompasses our emissions from our own operations - and the properties that we manage for investors and our occupiers - as well as our indirect supply chain emissions, (Scope 3). Since we are the largest manager of Commercial Real Estate Properties, CBRE has a real commitment, real obligations and responsibilities to help everyone in the world address the challenges of global warming on our planet. We also have a very strong focus on helping many of our clients achieve similar goals.”
CBRE's Responsible Sourcing Ethos
CBRE has recently made large strides in their commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Chidsey says: “We've appointed a Chief Responsibility Officer, Tim Dismond, who's actually responsible for all of our Environmental, Social Responsibility and Governance initiatives, including Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I). CBRE has also recently made a $1BN commitment to DE&I, that includes our employee resource groups, and the commitment to resources for our employees, as well as a commitment to the supplier diversity and the supply chain. So in recent years, CBRE has made huge strides in the area of DE&I, including a robust amount of programming for our employees to continue our education process on how to bring DE&I to the workplace, and to keep it there.”
Beyond these commitments, CBRE is also committed to Sustainability. 78% of their clients have carbon reduction goals, and 57% have Net-Zero or Carbon Neutrality commitments. Many of them are committed to science-based targets just as CBRE are, themselves. Furthermore, 49% of their clients have actual, finalised sustainability plans. “Sustainability is paramount to the services that we offer to our clients,” says Chidsey. “So it’s critical that CBRE is knowledgeable in this regard, so that we can, in turn, help our clients and serve them as they go along their own Sustainability journeys, which can take time and expertise to achieve.”
The CBRE T-mobile Merger and Looking to the Future
CBRE’s focus has been helping T-Mobile work through all the challenges and opportunities that have come through their merger. “Our central focus is to help T-Mobile achieve its ultimate goal, which is to be the number one telecommunications provider, through their uncarrier approach which, boldly proclaimed, has been very successful so far,” says Chidsey. Our next 12 to 18 months involve helping them with their go-to-market strategy and any optimisation needed in their portfolio strategy, always innovating with new technologies and processes and eliminating and reducing cost to their enterprise.”
