Steve Marcinuk

The Housing Choice Voucher Program, commonly known as Section 8, has always had structural demand behind it: roughly 2.2 million low-income households currently receive rental assistance through the program, while only about a quarter of eligible households actually get it due to funding limits, leaving long waiting lists in most major metros. What’s changed more ...

Months after the Altadena fires, the gap between approved permits and actual construction starts points to a bottleneck that has little to do with city bureaucracy. Homeowners with insurance payouts in hand are still not committing to builders. The reason, increasingly, is not approval delays but pricing: most homeowners rebuilding after a fire cannot get ...

The conventional narrative about commercial office space post-COVID is one of excess supply and desperate landlords. In northern and central New Jersey, the reality facing small and mid-sized tenants is more complicated, and more expensive, than most of them expect. A consolidation has reshaped the state’s office market over the past several years. Buildings have ...

Sellers in Eldorado, at Santa Fe, the community just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, are still anchored to pandemic-era pricing, but buyers arriving from out of state are refusing to pay those prices unless every detail is move-in ready. That disconnect has become the defining friction in a market that has shifted into buyer’s ...

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), ...