A long-running real-estate association has renamed and rebranded itself to better align with its member groups and advocacy goals.

On July 1, NAIOP announced that its new name is the Commercial Real Estate Development Association (CREDA). The last time the association changed its name was in 2009, when it shifted from the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties to the NAIOP acronym alone. 

“We kept the acronym, which was great for the legacy side of things, but there were folks in commercial real estate who viewed us as strictly the I and the O, industrial and office,” said CREDA CEO and President Marc Selvitelli, CAE. “Our members have evolved into so much more beyond that.”

More specifically, the association’s member groups are now heavily represented by mixed-use and multifamily properties, as well as data centers. That shift prompted the development of a task force to look into names that would better reflect the association’s focus. 

The task force—made up of a “melting pot of our membership,” Selvitelli said—considered up to 24 names at one point, and ultimately submitted four to the NAIOP board for consideration. (One of those options was to preserve the status quo and remain NAIOP.) To help ensure consensus around the change, the board set a guideline that the winning name would need to be approved by a two-thirds majority, rather than a strict majority.

One sticking point in the discussions: The D in CREDA, they decided, should stand for “development” not “developers”—a substantial difference in commercial real estate. “Developers exist primarily for commercial real estate developers and people who develop or invest in their own commercial spaces,” Selvitelli said. “But we said development was important because it’s the process, not the person. Whether that’s with the brokers, the architects, the attorneys—development captures the process, so we thought that in the end it was important to keep that.”

The CREDA name got the nod last summer, which gave the association a year to establish new branding and make additional changes. Selvitelli said no changes in staff numbers or organizational structure accompanies the rebrand, but it has overhauled the structure of its fall conference to better reflect the breadth of its membership. 

“Now we have four dedicated learning tracks, and those learning tracks are focusing on asset classes,” he said. “Industrial is one, but the other three class tracks are mixed use, multifamily, and tech, so it’s not just offices.” 

Elevating that variety of member groups, he said, along with a clearer name, will hopefully attract more members who had previously thought CREDA’s focus was limited. Selvitelli said a name change can also help with advocacy, sparing the association from having to over-explain its mission to legislators with limited time.

“The first thing they would say is, ‘You’re the office and industrial people, right?’” he said. “To put it in real estate terms, we were wasting valuable real estate in an interview or in a meeting with an elected official describing who we were rather than being able to talk about the issues at hand. Now the name not only reflects what our members do, but it’s intuitively obvious who we are and what we do, which was lacking with our previous name.”