Steve Marcinuk

In an industry where margins rank among the lowest of any major sector when risk is factored in, the process of sourcing bulk construction materials, aggregates, steel, pipe, and cementitious products remains surprisingly primitive. Contractors still rely on phone calls, voicemails, and personal networks to locate basic supplies. McKinsey and others estimate that up to ...

Retail real estate underwriting has relied on foot traffic and mobile location data for the better part of a decade. The logic is straightforward: more visits should mean more sales. But that assumption breaks down more often than the industry acknowledges. The gap between visits and actual purchasing behavior is one that landlords, tenant representatives, ...

Home prices in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro are declining, but the cost of building anything continues to climb. That disconnect, cheaper finished homes, more expensive inputs, is compressing builder profits and creating budget surprises for owners who haven’t priced a project recently, according to Vamsi Emani, Chief Cost Estimator at Aguirre Project Resources (APR) in ...

Cedar has long been the default choice for exterior wood applications in American residential construction. It’s available, familiar, and relatively affordable. But builders and architects working on high-end homes, particularly full-clad exteriors in mountain regions, are increasingly moving away from domestic species and toward thermally modified alternatives that offer greater dimensional stability and longer warranties. ...

Two years ago, Manhattan’s office market carried vacancy rates around 25 percent, a figure that reflected years of pandemic-era uncertainty and leasing volume that had cratered from a healthy annual pace of 40 million square feet to single digits. Today, according to Bert Rosenblatt, Managing Principal at Cresa’s New York office, that vacancy rate sits ...

Construction technology has attracted billions in venture capital on the promise that software and automation would bring costs down. But for owners and developers – the people actually funding projects – costs have continued to climb year over year, even as contractors and subcontractors report real efficiency gains from AI adoption. The gains are real; ...

The common assumption about modular construction is that it exists to serve one purpose: cheap housing for cost-constrained developments. That framing is outdated. Modular systems are increasingly showing up in five-star hotels, commercial buildings, and resort developments – applications where finish quality and design matter as much as cost savings. The shift is being driven ...

The traditional office lease, five or ten years, fixed rent, passive landlord, made sense when vacancy in major metros hovered in the single digits. In Los Angeles today, roughly 40% of office space sits empty, according to Jerome Chang, founder and licensed architect of BLANKSPACES, one of America’s longest-running coworking brands. That vacancy rate means ...

Insurance companies already know what’s wrong with a house before a buyer makes an offer. They know the roof age, the flood exposure, the permit history. Buyers typically don’t have access to that same information until after closing, or never at all. That gap between what insurers know and what buyers see is not a ...

The Hamptons real estate market remains stable even as buyer behavior becomes more cautious and deliberate. Veteran agents Patricia Oakley and Brian Leicht of the Oakley Leicht team at Saunders & Associates describe a landscape shaped by long-term changes in demand, inventory, and buyer expectations. Oakley, who entered real estate after 18 years in pharmaceuticals, ...

Early claims that 3D-printed construction would be 100 percent cheaper and 200 percent faster than conventional building went undelivered, eroding investor confidence. Now, with roughly 150 single-family homes completed in the United States and up to 300 more under construction across multiple communities, according to Boris Kozlov, Founder & CEO of AC3D (Automated Construction 3D), ...

The commercial real estate market in Greenville, South Carolina’s upstate region, is not frozen, but the velocity of transactions has slowed enough that a different kind of legal work is filling the pipeline. Rather than closing acquisitions and dispositions, local developers are focused on stabilizing their existing portfolios: getting buildings leased, generating cash flow, and ...

The term “house fishing,” a play on catfishing, has entered the real estate lexicon for a reason. Buyers scrolling through listings encounter rooms furnished with AI-generated pieces that look beautiful online but bear no relationship to anything they could actually purchase or recreate. The gap between what a listing promises and what a buyer walks ...

The promise of AI in real estate deal analysis has grown louder over the past two years, with vendors suggesting the technology could eventually handle transactions from sourcing through close. However, the reality on the ground looks different, particularly in markets like Chicago, where land valuation and investment screening require pulling data from multiple fragmented ...

Of roughly 1.4 million real estate agents in the United States, only about 140,000 to 150,000 currently hang their licenses with cloud-based brokerages, roughly 10 percent of the agent population. Despite a decade of visibility, the model remains early in its adoption curve. What’s accelerating now isn’t just organic agent recruitment. It’s consolidation. Independent broker-owners ...