Alejandra Rodriguez-Villamizar is a communications specialist, editor, and researcher based in Medellín, Colombia, with experience working at the intersection of investigative journalism, strategic communications, and multimedia storytelling. She is currently Editorial Consultant at KeyCrew, where she leads and refines editorial processes, and manages and mentors the editorial team. Before this role, Alejandra coordinated multimedia content production and designed impact metrics. She conducted in-depth research on organized crime across Latin American countries, contributing to investigative reports that inform public debate and policy discussions. Her career also includes work in digital strategy and audience engagement at University College London, where she supported the Anthropology Department’s outreach and career initiatives. Alejandra holds a BA in Communications and Journalism from Universidad EAFIT and an MSc in Politics, Violence and Crime from UCL, graduating with distinction. Her work is grounded in a people-centered approach that combines rigorous research, clear storytelling, and strategic thinking to generate social impact.
Building an ADU in a Los Angeles backyard has always meant one financial path: rent it out. A homeowner could house a family member or find a tenant, but selling the unit as standalone property required a costly lot split. A policy change already active in parts of California may eliminate that barrier, turning backyard ...
Short-term rentals made small-scale landlording look easy for years. Buy a house, list it on Airbnb, collect nightly rates that dwarf a traditional lease payment. But in Houston, experienced brokers are now steering investor clients away from that model entirely, and toward a strategy called co-sharing that trades flashy nightly rates for something harder to ...
Small commercial property owners have spent the past few years hearing that insurance is getting harder to secure and more expensive across the board. For strip mall operators, warehouse landlords, and retail building investors, the assumption has been that coverage will only keep tightening. According to Andrew Kowalske, Chief Product Officer at Blitz Insurance, the ...
The challenge facing homeowners trying to sell in North Texas isn’t soft demand; it’s that builders down the street are offering rate buydowns and design credits that no individual seller can easily match. Across Collin County’s fast-growing suburbs, Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, Celina, Melissa, new construction communities continue to expand. Those builders routinely offer incentives worth ...
The Coachella Valley real estate market is splitting along price lines. Properties above $1 million are still moving. Below $500,000, activity has slowed noticeably, a dynamic that complicates the conventional wisdom about retirement destinations as uniformly resilient markets. John Gonnello, a Realtor with HomeSmart Professionals in Palm Desert, California, has spent close to 40 years ...
The Austin housing market has shifted far enough toward buyers that seller concessions now appear on virtually every purchase contract crossing a lender’s desk. That alone marks a reversal for a market that, just two and a half to three years ago, required buyers to close in two to three weeks or risk losing a ...
Most conversations about artificial intelligence in real estate focus on the consumer-facing layer: smarter search, better recommendations, automated valuations. The more consequential question is playing out one level deeper: who controls the intelligence that gets built from organized real estate data, and what infrastructure exists to govern that process before it becomes irreversible. That question ...
The conventional wisdom about Houston real estate centers on its sprawling suburban subdivisions and energy-sector wealth. But in 2026, the market’s most active corridors aren’t in the established inner suburbs; they’re in communities like Crosby, Magnolia, Waller, and Dayton, where buyers are trading proximity for acreage, lower flood risk, and significantly more house per dollar ...
Rework consumes an estimated 5 to 12 percent of total project cost on the average commercial build, according to research from the Construction Industry Institute and other industry studies, and design errors and omissions account for roughly a quarter of that figure. On a $50 million project, that’s millions of dollars in avoidable cost, much ...
Houston’s housing market sits in an unusual position among major U.S. metros. The fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country has maintained modest positive home price growth while cities like Austin and Dallas have undergone post-pandemic price corrections. But that relative stability masks a growing tension on the ground: resale sellers are struggling to compete with ...
Balanced market data can mask what’s actually happening on the ground. In Cypress, Texas, one of northwest Houston’s fastest-growing suburbs, the numbers through July 2026 show stable pricing and no clear advantage for buyers or sellers. But according to Andrea Curran, Team Leader of The Andrea Curran Team at Compass, something shifted around the first ...
A property that sits outside a designated FEMA flood zone is not necessarily free of flood risk. It may simply be in territory nobody has formally assessed yet. The United States has roughly three and a half million miles of streams, rivers, and coastlines. FEMA has mapped about 1.1 million of those miles, roughly a ...
In lower Westchester County, New York, the supply-demand imbalance that defined the pandemic-era housing market has not corrected. At the million-dollar price point in White Plains, the county’s urban center, homes are moving in nine to twelve days. The driver is not speculation or pandemic migration. It is a structural relationship between Manhattan’s cost of ...
Seller concessions in San Antonio have shifted from rare to routine. Builders are covering closing costs and upgrades. Resale sellers are addressing deferred maintenance they once ignored. And buyers, particularly first-timers and millennials entering the market, are negotiating terms that did not exist when inventory was tighter. The dynamic is familiar across Sun Belt markets ...
Sellers in Austin are conceding something on nearly every deal right now. But the form those concessions take determines how much value buyers actually capture. According to Joel Richardson, VP & Branch Manager at First Community Mortgage’s Austin office, buyers who direct concessions toward closing costs rather than price reductions get significantly more from the ...
