Alcynna Lloyd
Alcynna Lloyd is a real estate reporter and economic journalist at Business Insider, covering how housing markets, costs, and mobility shape everyday life decisions. Her work stands out for connecting data on rents, home prices, and city trends with stories from people navigating debt, multigenerational living, and moving abroad in search of lower costs. She focuses on the practical consequences of economic shifts, using rankings, lists, and reported features to show where housing is becoming unsustainable and what alternatives people are finding.
Housing costs, renters, and household strategies
Lloyd’s core coverage examines the strain of housing costs on renters and homeowners and the strategies they use to cope. In a piece on high rents and debt, she profiles three young people who move back in with their parents, tracing how rent burdens, loans, and limited income push them toward multigenerational living as a financial safety valve.
She extends this focus in work on multigenerational living reshaping the American dream, highlighting families combining households to manage rising expenses while maintaining stability.
Her reporting often follows renters as they push back against landlords and opaque housing systems.
In coverage of New York City, she writes about renters who build a website to uncover rent-stabilized apartments that landlords try to hide, framing their effort as a grassroots response to high rents and information asymmetry. On the ownership side, she covers “desperate home sellers” who are effectively paying buyers through concessions and incentives, showing how sellers adjust expectations and pricing in a sluggish or unaffordable market.
Across these stories, she returns to how housing costs intersect with debt, savings, and family support, treating home and rent decisions as central economic choices rather than lifestyle footnotes.
Moving abroad, remote work, and cheap cities
A second strand of Lloyd’s coverage looks at relocation and life abroad as a response to high costs at home.
She writes about a couple who move from the US to Costa Rica and save about $1,500 a month, using their story to illustrate how lower housing and living costs can transform budgets and long-term plans. In a service piece on cities around the world where people can live cheaply, she maps destinations that appeal to digital nomads and remote workers, pairing cost comparisons with quality-of-life details to show what a realistic move might look like.
These articles track how remote work and flexible careers enable people to leave expensive markets and seek “affordable paradise” elsewhere. Lloyd frequently invites readers to share their own experiences of finding cheaper places to live, signaling a reporting style that builds on firsthand accounts of moving, renting, and buying abroad. Together, this work distinguishes her from more traditional real estate coverage by focusing on mobility and cross-border moves as everyday economic strategies rather than niche lifestyle choices.
Rankings, lists, and real estate industry coverage
Lloyd regularly uses rankings and lists to make complex housing markets more navigable.
In her piece on the 10 best and 10 worst states to buy a home in 2026, she breaks down US markets into clear categories, helping readers see where the balance of prices, inventory, and broader conditions make buying more or less attractive. She also works on Business Insider’s Rising Stars of Real Estate list, handling open nominations and positioning the project as a way to identify emerging professionals shaping the industry.
This franchise work places her at the intersection of consumer-focused service journalism and insider recognition of market players.
Across these projects, Lloyd blends data, expert input, and clear criteria to produce coverage that is both accessible and grounded in the realities of the market.
Her lists and rankings offer practical entry points for people weighing where to buy or which professionals and trends are gaining influence, while her features on renters and movers supply the human context behind the numbers. The combination gives her beat a defined shape: she treats housing as an economic system people must navigate, and her work aims to show both the map and the stories of those finding their way.
City economies and shifting fortunes
Lloyd’s reporting also tracks how city-level housing and migration shifts signal broader economic change.
In coverage of cities that were pandemic darlings but have lost their shine, she writes about rising costs slowing migration into places like Miami and the challenges this poses for their growth prospects. That work fits with author-page language that frames developments in individual cities as “a bad sign for the city’s economy,” indicating her habit of reading housing and population trends as economic indicators rather than isolated phenomena.
By linking city fortunes to housing affordability and migration patterns, Lloyd situates her real estate beat within larger questions about urban resilience and opportunity.
Her pieces show that where people can afford to live, whether they stay, leave, or move back home, has direct implications for local economies and future growth. This consistent economic framing is the through-line in her work: she reports on housing not just as property, but as a primary arena where individual finances, family decisions, and city trajectories converge.
4 more real estate journalists.
Addie Morfoot
Addie Morfoot covers how real estate, culture and media meet, focusing on people, rules and the way homes shape a life. She reports for The New York Times on housing and lifestyle, from personal narratives about finding a home after loss to features on how short-term rental policy affects everyday owners and renters. She writes real estate stories that connect laws and regulations to the choices available to ordinary residents in specific towns and cities. She is a regular contributor to the Sunday Routine franchise, following actors, comedians and designers through a typical day and showing how settings like homes, studios and subway cars shape daily experience. She also has a long track record covering documentary film and the entertainment business, including legal questions around fair use, changing docu-series formats, festival premieres and financing. Her portfolio spans more than two decades of work for The New York Times, Variety, The Wall Street Journal and Crain’s New York Business.
Alec Lazenby
Alec Lazenby covers how provincial politics and government decisions shape housing, real estate and the wider social fabric. He reports for The Vancouver Sun from the provincial legislature. His work examines HousingHub, middle-income rentals, affordability, stalled projects, empty condos, developer layoffs, municipal housing targets and land use. He also covers health, addiction, safer supply, involuntary care, water rights, resource management, Indigenous rights and Crown land. Lazenby connects policy language to specific buildings, rents, projects, services and people. He explains financial, regulatory and market pressures, then follows how institutions, professionals, developers, municipalities and affected communities respond. His reporting tests government goals against practical outcomes and shows how policy reversals, construction costs, interest rates and political accountability shape housing and public life.
Amir Ali
Amir Ali links housing, disputes, and oddball neighbourhood stories in case-based, street-level reporting for Daily Hive. He holds a senior editorial and writing role, listed on the masthead as part of Vancouver leadership and described as a staff writer. His core beat is real estate, especially the rental market and housing affordability, tracking rent ranges, market shifts, and how pressures land on people trying to stay housed. He also covers crime, civil tribunals, and mental health, explaining decisions and conflicts in plain language that focuses on timelines, behaviour, and outcomes. Ali writes offbeat hyperlocal features, traffic and transport disruptions, business, food, and general local news, often turning infrastructure, small businesses, and civic systems into tangible stories. A former radio producer, he brings tight pacing and clear stakes to written pieces and maintains an active social media presence as a broadcaster and writer.
Andrea Yu
Andrea Yu is a freelance journalist whose real estate coverage for The Globe and Mail uses detailed buyer case studies to show how specific budgets translate into real homes and condos. She focuses on affordability, treating each purchase as a clear before-and-after narrative where price, unit type, location and lifestyle needs are all visible. Her Home Run series follows individual buyers or households through a defined budget and search, then documents what they actually buy and the compromises they make. Her housing reporting feeds into broader coverage of affordability and access to housing. Alongside real estate, she maintains a wider portfolio across business, culture, design, health, food, drink and travel for general-interest magazines, drawing on prior staff roles and formal journalism training to keep her stories precise on numbers and grounded in everyday life.