Andrea Yu
Andrea Yu is a freelance journalist whose real estate coverage for The Globe and Mail focuses on how individual buyers navigate the practical realities of Canada’s housing market, with budgets and trade-offs at the centre of the story. Her reporting treats each purchase as a case study in affordability, showing what different price points actually deliver in concrete homes and condos. Alongside real estate, she maintains a broader portfolio in life, culture and business, which keeps her housing pieces grounded in everyday experience rather than abstract market commentary.
Buyer case studies and Home Run
Yu’s signature format at The Globe and Mail follows a single buyer or household through a defined budget and a specific search, then documents what they ultimately buy. In one Home Run feature, she profiles a young couple with a $700,000 budget looking for a home in Canada, tracing how that figure translates into property options and the compromises required to close a deal.
In another widely cited piece, she follows a chef who sets a $500,000 budget for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo in Vancouver, showing what that amount secures in a competitive urban market. These stories combine the buyer’s constraints, the property details and the final outcome in a clear before-and-after structure, making the housing search readable as a narrative with defined stakes.
The Home Run series is explicitly participatory, inviting readers to put themselves forward as subjects, which reinforces her focus on real households rather than hypothetical buyer personas. Within each instalment, Yu brings together price, unit type and location with qualitative factors such as lifestyle needs and expectations, so the decision-making process is visible rather than implied. The emphasis is on the choices buyers make - how they adjust their wish lists, respond to market conditions and decide when a property is “good enough” at a given budget - rather than on the mechanics of the deal alone.
This case-study approach distinguishes her real estate coverage from more generic listings-focused reporting, because the buyer’s story is the organizing frame and the property details serve that narrative rather than leading it.
Tracking affordability in a lived housing market
Yu’s buyer-focused features sit within The Globe and Mail’s real estate coverage, which includes weekly housing news roundups, transaction reports and market analysis. Her work feeds into broader packages that highlight top real estate stories, featured properties and rental trends, underlining that her case studies are part of a continuing conversation about affordability and access to housing. In coverage referencing her Vancouver condo story, the buyer’s budget is treated as a key data point, illustrating how far $500,000 stretches in a major market and how buyers respond when that figure limits their options. That framing - budget first, property second - allows her stories to function both as human-interest features and as informal benchmarks of what specific price ranges can achieve.
Across her housing reporting, price, product and personal circumstance are treated as a three-part equation rather than separate themes. By keeping the numbers visible and anchoring them to real transactions, Yu gives context to broader discussions of housing costs, interest rates and market pressure without turning her work into technical analysis.
The result is coverage that shows the housing market as buyers experience it: in saved-down payments, bidding decisions, and the moment a unit or house is chosen over competing options. That lived-market perspective is consistent with her wider work on housing and real estate, which has been noted in profiles of her reporting for city and national magazines.
Real estate within a wider lifestyle and business portfolio
Yu’s real estate reporting is one strand of a broader freelance practice that spans business, culture, design, health, food, drink and travel.
She writes for general-interest publications, including Toronto Life and Maclean’s, where she contributes real estate stories alongside lifestyle and business features. Other professional biographies describe a beat that encompasses employment, lifestyle and women’s health as well as property and markets, indicating that she treats housing as part of a larger picture of how people live and work. This breadth of subject matter gives her real estate pieces a non-specialist tone: the reporting is precise on prices and property details, but the framing comes from everyday concerns rather than industry jargon.
Her background includes staff writing roles at magazines focused on city life and food, combined with formal training in journalism.
That mix of structured reporting experience and lifestyle coverage informs the way she presents homes and neighbourhoods, with attention both to the financial terms of a purchase and to how a property fits into a subject’s routines and aspirations. Across outlets, Yu’s work stays close to the reader’s world - restaurants, travel, health, workplaces and homes - which reinforces the human-scale focus visible in her housing case studies.
When she writes about real estate, she brings that same approach to the beat, treating each story as a detailed portrait of a buyer, a budget and a specific place to live rather than as an abstract market trend.
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.
Alcynna Lloyd
Alcynna Lloyd is a real estate reporter and economic journalist at Business Insider whose work is distinct for treating housing as a core economic system people must navigate. She covers how housing markets, costs, and mobility shape everyday life decisions, connecting data on rents, home prices, and city trends with stories of people managing debt, multigenerational living, and moves abroad. Her beat centers on housing costs, renters, and household strategies, following renters pushing back against landlords and tracking “desperate home sellers” using concessions in unaffordable markets. A second strand of her coverage focuses on relocation, remote work, and cheap cities as everyday economic strategies. She regularly uses rankings and lists, such as best and worst states to buy a home and Rising Stars of Real Estate, and reads city housing and migration shifts as signs of broader economic change.
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.