Alexis Weisend

Alexis Weisend covers the business side of housing with a focus on how real estate markets, technology and policy decisions shape daily life for buyers, renters and small businesses. She is a business reporter at The Seattle Times who is currently filling in as the masthead’s real estate reporter, building on a background covering housing affordability, home sales trends and rental challenges. Her work stands out for pairing detailed market data and regulatory developments with lived experience reporting and direct engagement with readers.

Housing affordability and single-family rentals

A core strand of Weisend’s coverage examines why housing costs have become so difficult to manage, especially in single-family rentals. In her reporting on the challenge of finding and affording single-family rentals, she traces how rising mortgage payments and home prices have pushed rents for single-family homes above multifamily units, using long-range data comparisons to show how payment gaps have widened over time. She explains the economic incentives that lead landlords to sell rather than rent, and how those decisions ripple through local inventories and prices, grounding the story in interviews with renters spending more than half their income on housing.

She also tracks the top end of the market, including a feature on Seattle’s most expensive home for sale cutting its asking price by $30 million, treating luxury listings as indicators of broader shifts in high-end demand and pricing. Across these pieces, she connects micro stories about individual homes to macro trends in interest rates, inventory and investment, keeping the focus on what those dynamics mean for people trying to live in single-family houses rather than just the mechanics of the market.

Gen Z homeowners and new paths to ownership

Weisend devotes sustained attention to generational shifts in homeownership, especially among Gen Z buyers. In her feature on Gen Z homeowners in the Seattle area, she documents how people under 25 are assembling down payments and qualifying for mortgages through nontraditional means, including loans and gifts from parents, co-buying with siblings and inheritances. She uses survey data to quantify how common these strategies have become and contrasts those figures with the broader population, showing that younger buyers are relying on family wealth and shared ownership at higher rates than previous generations.

The story blends data from financial institutions with detailed case studies of individual buyers, illustrating how they navigate student debt, high home prices and limited starter inventory. Weisend’s work on this theme has been recognized with a national real estate journalism honor, underscoring her ability to turn complex housing finance questions into accessible narratives about how a new generation is getting into the market. She continues this line of reporting through callouts asking young homeowners to share their experiences, using reader input to inform subsequent coverage.

Zillow, Redfin and the business of housing data

Another distinguishing strand of her beat is close coverage of real estate platforms and the regulatory scrutiny around them. In her piece on how Zillow changed homebuying and selling over 20 years, Weisend walks through how public access to property valuations and listings has re-ordered every step of the transaction, from search and pricing to agent work and seller strategy. She situates Zillow’s rise in the context of both on-market and off-market data, explaining how the company’s tools reshaped expectations about transparency and control for consumers and professionals.

She complements that long-view analysis with sharper regulatory stories, including coverage of the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Zillow and Redfin over a rental listing deal. In that reporting, she details the alleged agreement that made Zillow the exclusive provider of multifamily rental listings for Redfin, the associated $100 million payment and the FTC’s contention that the arrangement would reduce competition and increase advertising costs for landlords and property managers. Weisend’s treatment of these stories emphasizes market power, antitrust implications and labor impacts, noting how the deal was tied to layoffs and rehiring in the sector. Together, these pieces show her interest in the business infrastructure behind the housing market, not just the properties themselves.

Short-term rentals, small businesses and reader callouts

Weisend extends her housing coverage into adjacent business beats, including short-term rentals and small business resilience. Ahead of the World Cup, she reported on declining short-term rental demand in Seattle during match dates, using data from a market analytics firm to show a drop in bookings compared with the prior year and exploring reasons hosts and investors might be seeing softer demand despite a major event. In business coverage beyond housing, she has examined city payouts for vandalized small businesses, asking whether increased compensation levels are sufficient and highlighting how repeated property damage affects margins and survival prospects for storefronts.

Reader engagement is a consistent feature of her reporting. Weisend publishes callouts asking people who recently took out adjustable-rate mortgages to share their experiences, indicating a focus on how interest-rate risk is playing out in households rather than only in bank reports. She has similarly sought stories from homeowners who found or sold properties through social media, signaling an interest in how nontraditional channels are reshaping the transaction process. These efforts feed into her broader work on housing affordability and market behavior, giving her coverage a grounded quality that reflects the experiences of renters, small-business owners and new homeowners as much as it reflects the movements of prices and platforms.

Across these threads, Weisend’s reporting combines data-heavy analysis, regulatory and platform coverage, and finely reported human stories about the strain and opportunity in contemporary housing markets. Her consistent focus on affordability, generational paths to ownership, rental dynamics and the business impacts of policy and platform deals defines her niche within The Seattle Times business desk.