Mary Griffin
Mary Griffin is a longtime reporter at CHEK News whose real estate coverage is rooted in a wider focus on how economic and policy shifts play out in everyday life. She treats the housing market as one piece of a larger story about local business, infrastructure, and community safety, using specific events and long-run trends to show how change feels on the ground. Her work on Greater Victoria’s housing inventory reaching an 11-year high sits alongside reporting on business resilience, major projects, and weather emergencies, giving her real estate stories a broader context than a narrowly transactional beat.
Housing market shifts within a changing local economy
Griffin’s real estate reporting centres on housing supply and market cycles, with pieces that highlight milestones such as Greater Victoria’s housing inventory reaching an 11-year high and what that signals for buyers, sellers, and policymakers.
She situates these housing stories within a wider economic narrative, connecting inventory trends and market pressure to the same local forces she covers in business and infrastructure. Her approach to real estate is to show housing as part of the economic fabric rather than a standalone sector, keeping attention on how market shifts affect everyday decisions and stability.
Business resilience and the impact of policy and trade
A recurring thread in Griffin’s work is the way businesses absorb shocks from policy changes, disasters, and broader economic forces. In coverage of a fire at Spinnakers Brewpub, she followed the story over time to mark the one-year point where the business celebrated staying open after the crisis, treating continuity itself as newsworthy.
She has reported on new U.S. tariffs and how they leave clothing retailers scrambling, focusing on the operational stress and uncertainty that come with sudden changes in trade rules.
In a piece asking what billions in projects announced in a single week mean for British Columbia, she framed large-scale investment as a question of impact, looking beyond headline numbers to what major spending does to the province’s economic landscape. Across these stories, Griffin’s reporting on business and policy aligns closely with her real estate beat, emphasizing how external forces - whether tariffs, investment, or disaster - reshape the environment in which housing and commerce operate.
Infrastructure, environment and public safety
Griffin regularly covers infrastructure and environmental events where safety and reliability are at stake. She has reported on a road collapse from heavy rain that led to a logging truck fatality near Lake Cowichan, connecting extreme weather to the vulnerability of transport routes and the human cost when infrastructure fails.
Her coverage of record February snowfall hammering Greater Victoria treated weather not as spectacle but as a practical disruption, focusing on how unusual conditions strain systems and residents. In reporting on proposed changes to the Mill Bay–Brentwood Bay ferry, she examined how route shifts affect demand and access, showing the link between transport decisions and the communities that depend on them. She has also covered the province’s hiring of outside counsel to begin its legal challenge of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, framing infrastructure not only as physical assets but as subjects of legal and political contest. These stories underpin her real estate coverage by tracing how transport, environment, and major projects influence the desirability, risk, and connectivity of places.
Long-running community stories and major investigations
Beyond economics and infrastructure, Griffin invests in long-running community narratives and high-stakes investigations. She has profiled a couple completing an eight-year cross-Canada hiking trek, treating endurance and commitment as news in their own right. Her reporting on rugby tour tragedy and the British coroner’s inquest into a student’s death at Shawnigan Lake followed the legal process to clarify what happened and why the death was ultimately ruled a tragic accident.
She has covered new charity rides that send cyclists across Vancouver Island twice to support childhood cancer programs, and Tour de Rock’s efforts that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer research and support for children with cancer, emphasizing the fundraising outcomes and community effort behind these events.
Griffin’s author biography notes that she joined CHEK News in 2003 and that her early reporting included the year’s biggest story, a Boxing Day operation in which police executed search warrants on multiple offices, setting her trajectory as a reporter used to working on complex, sensitive investigations. The same patience and attention to consequence that she brings to these community and investigative pieces is visible in her real estate coverage, where housing trends are treated as part of long-term stories about people, institutions, and place.
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.