Carrie Woerdeman is the new president of Commercial Real Estate Women Iowa (CREW) for 2025 and is the executive director of Home Inc., a position she has held for about 18 months. She sees leading both organizations as a natural fit for her as she navigates Home Inc.’s mission of increasing homeownership opportunities by providing services that range from homeless prevention to pre-purchase counseling, homebuyer education and post-purchase homeowner support. 

Home Inc. is also a community housing development organization, building affordable homes, primarily as infill development, in Polk, Dallas and Warren counties. 

Leading Home Inc. is Woerdeman’s first venture into the nonprofit world. Her professional background is in property management, having worked for about 13 years for a small, family-owned business that when she started had a portfolio of about 1,200 multifamily, mostly affordable housing units. That portfolio expanded to include office space, retail and storage units, assets that Woerdeman managed as well. 

She says it was her connections through CREW that led to her role at Home Inc. after holding previous positions at Kading Properties and the Iowa Finance Authority. A recruiter reached out after receiving recommendations from CREW members that she’d be a good fit for the position, Woerdeman said.

Woerdeman said she fell into real estate after graduating from college with degrees in natural resource management and environmental studies with plans to do environmental, social or governance work. 

The Business Record sat down with Woerdeman to learn more about the work she does with Home Inc. and CREW Iowa. Her responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

For people who may not be familiar with CREW, can you describe the organization and the work that it does?

At the heart of it, we’re a professional networking organization. We are very much a relationship-based networking organization. What distinguishes CREW is that building personal relationships comes first. So building personal relationships with people as I’m networking, and that makes us really confident in referring business to each other. There are a lot of deals and business that happens within CREW members.

Who are the typical members of CREW Iowa?

First, we have almost 200 members, which is pretty good for our size market. There are almost 14,000 members internationally. Our membership is pretty heavy in lawyers, brokerage and finance, accounting, asset management, and commercial lending. Everything from human resources, risk management, corporate real estate executive, architects, acquisitions. Most of our economic development folks are civic members, so as a nonprofit I’m a civic member, but we also have members who are employees of the cities in the metro.

You mentioned CREW’s efforts to attract young people into commercial real estate. Can you describe what those efforts look like?

There’s the CREW Network Foundation, the philanthropic arm, a nonprofit that people can donate to. They focus on career outreach, education and scholarships. They provide a lot of materials that are really targeted at high school and college students. At the high school level it’s really more introduction to commercial real estate and the types of careers you can participate in. At the chapter level, we’ve decided to expand that into middle school and elementary school. Commercial real estate is anything from a GED to a Ph.D., there’s a job for you. So there is really something for everybody. And that’s what we really try to talk about. The college programing is largely focused on getting into college campuses and making sure that people know what opportunities are available. The other really great component about the college programming is the scholarship program. This year there will be 40 scholarships awarded, 25 to undergrads and 15 to graduate students. For undergrads it’s $5,000 and it’s $10,000 for graduate students, and those scholarship recipients also receive a two-year membership to CREW. They also receive free admission to the annual convention where they’re surrounded by about 1,4000 career commercial professional women and have the opportunity to network with established commercial real estate professionals.

What are the strategic goals for CREW in 2025?

We did a five-year strategic plan last October. Normally, it’s always setting goals for how we want to grow and improve the organization. This year we are really focusing on implementing the things that came out of strategic planning. So our big goals are creating value to our members, whether that’s helping make better and make more business connections, highlighting member deals and getting more publicity for the projects our members are working on in the community, getting more exposure for those projects, and just improving transparency.

As you grow it’s harder and harder. People are further removed from the board and as you grow you need to have more small groups and touch points and more intentional transparency so people know they have a say in what’s going on in the organization.

Are there correlations between what you went to school for that translate into your job today?

That natural resources and environmental studies background is great for looking at things from a data-driven, scientific approach, problem-solving, really trained to be nimble, and a lot of those things tie back to commercial real estate. A lot of what I do in this role at Home Inc. is problem-solving, putting out fires, figuring out how to overcome barriers, so that’s good training for that. 

Speaking about your role at Home Inc., what are some challenges that exist for the organization today?

No. 1, obviously, there is a significant shortage of housing and affordable housing, and construction costs are such that a lot of the housing development we do is in Des Moines on infill lots because that’s where we can get affordable lots. Even so, we’re finding that all-in construction costs and development fees are coming in at about $335,000 and we’re getting appraisals closer to $280,000 to $285,000. That’s one of the significant challenges in Des Moines proper. The suburbs don’t have that problem because they have a stronger market and don’t have that appraisal gap. But what we see here, we see in rural Iowa with that same appraisal gap. The other challenge is always funding. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires that 15% of HOME funds that are allocated through entitlements are designated for community housing development organizations. We have historically relied largely on federal funds for construction. They are a main source of funding for our construction on the development side, and historically that has been fairly reliable. Right now, we really have no idea what’s going to happen. We don’t know if HUD will continue to support the programs or what programs will be supported or at what level. Our construction pipeline is really strong. There was a lot of funding that came out of COVID, and we’re still working through some of that. We’ll bring 12 to 15 homes to the market this year, which is really strong, but after that, we’ll have to be a little bit more nimble to continue to build homes that we can sell to low- to moderate-income families.

What are some projects Home Inc. is working on that you can share with us?

We are identifying that three- to four-bedroom single-family homes are not the right fit for everybody. We also have a lot of requests from single individuals and people who are aging for smaller units or more accessible units. So we are actively working on some projects, one in particular, to bring affordable-ownership condo opportunities to the community. We’re actively engaging in conversations to look at townhome opportunities or different versions of higher density, smaller footprint and less maintenance requirements from the homeowner to bring a wider variety of opportunities to the market.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself.

I love to ski and I used to coach skiing at Seven Oaks. Eight years I coached up there. I also listen to a lot of books on tape. I try to listen to crime mysteries and thrillers. I’m part of a book club that a lot of CREW members are in and a lot of non-CREW members, and I usually listen to the book that’s picked every month.

---

At a Glance

Age: 44

Family: Married, a 19-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son.

Education: Double major in environmental studies and natural resource management, Northland College, Ashland, Wis.; graduate finance certificate, University of Iowa Tippie College of Business.

Activities: Skiing, camping, traveling, and hanging out with friends and family.

Contact: woerdeman.carrie@homeincdsm.org