The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast

What if the future of real estate was rooted in regeneration, not extraction?

In this episode of The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, Neal sits down with legendary permaculture designer Penny Livingston, whose work has spanned continents and inspired a generation of land stewards, builders, and community weavers.

Penny shares her journey from conventional landscape design to studying under permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison—and how that shift redefined not just her profession, but her entire worldview.

Together, they explore:

For years, we’ve seen the rising demand: people looking for more than just a home. They want community. They want connection. They want to live where food, farming, and stewardship are part of daily life.

But while the vision for agrihoods has gained attention, real-world examples that fully integrate regenerative agriculture, diverse housing, and a true sense of place are still few and far between.

In this episode, Neal sits down with Steve Bruere, President of Peoples Company — one of the nation’s leading agricultural brokerages — to explore both the current state of regenerative agricult...

What if the future of housing isn’t high-rises or cul-de-sacs—but homesteads, gardens, and walkable villages where food is grown just steps from your door?

In this episode Neal sits down with Judith Horvath of Fair Hill Farm—a former corporate professional turned agroecologist who’s helping reimagine how we live, grow, and build community.

Judith’s journey began humbly with a few backyard chickens and tomato plants—but after facing resistance from her suburban HOA, she chose to go all in. Trading suburban restrictions for rural freedom, she and her family embarked on a bold journ...

In this episode, Neal sits down with Micha Mikailian, CEO of Geoship, to explore a bold attempt to reimagine housing at a time when affordability, resilience, and ecological design are more urgent than ever.

Geoship is reviving Buckminster Fuller’s iconic geodesic dome—not as a nostalgic throwback, but as a scalable, bioceramic solution to today's housing and climate crises. But this episode goes deeper than domes. Neal and Micha unpack the organizational model behind Geoship, how the company is being built around community, and why its mission is resonating so strongly before a single unit has even...

In this episode, Neal sits down with Micha Mikailian, CEO of Geoship, to explore a bold attempt to reimagine housing at a time when affordability, resilience, and ecological design are more urgent than ever.

Geoship is reviving Buckminster Fuller’s iconic geodesic dome—not as a nostalgic throwback, but as a scalable, bioceramic solution to today's housing and climate crises. But this episode goes deeper than domes. Neal and Micha unpack the organizational model behind Geoship, how the company is being built around community, and why its mission is resonating so strongly before a single unit has even...

When we talk about housing innovation, our minds usually go to big cities buzzing with new ideas. But in this episode of The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, host Neal Collins sits down with Wendy Reid Fairhurst of Reclaim CDO to explore a groundbreaking approach taking root far from the usual hotspots—in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

An architect-turned-community-builder, Wendy shares how her own challenges as a single parent searching for co-housing led her to develop a radically different model: Community-Led Development. Together, Neal and Wendy unpack how this approach is rewriting the script on affordability, belonging, and neig...

In this episode, we explore the inspiring story of Rooted Northwest, an agrivillage in Arlington, Washington that is transforming a former dairy farm into a thriving co-housing community. With over 85% of the land conserved as pastures and forests, Rooted Northwest weaves together two villages and a collectively managed regenerative farm.

Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to bring a visionary project like this to life—from assembling co-founders and shaping new county codes, to creating a supportive framework for farmers stewarding the land.

We’re joined by returning guest Katie McCamant, a pi...

The construction industry is at a turning point. Pre-manufactured housing seeks to disrupt conventional building methods due to labor shortages, weather delays, and material waste, as a faster, more efficient alternative. But efficiency shouldn’t come at the cost of health or sustainability.

In this episode, Neal Collins sits down with Evan Ryan, a founding member of Croft, a company pioneering a new approach to homebuilding. By integrating the speed of manufacturing with the benefits of natural building, Croft is able to produce homes that are actually carbon negative. Their homes use locally sourced straw fo...

This episode is a front-row seat at a masterclass in regenerative development. Mazyar Mortazavi, CEO of TAS Impact, joins us to share how his Toronto-based firm is redefining urban development by weaving community, sustainability, and impact into every project.

Mazyar’s journey is deeply personal—the organization’s strategic plan is following his old master's thesis on anti-gentrification strategies. His interest in this was shaped by growing up in an immigrant family and witnessing firsthand the effects of gentrification in Canada’s largest city. 

Under his leadership, TAS has e...

Tre' Cates is an entrepreneur and regenerative thought leader with over 25 years of experience. His work focuses on the importance of building healthy, regenerative organizational environments that support long-term goals without compromising the integrity of society or the environment. As the former COO of the Savory Institute, Tre' played a key role in shaping regenerative agriculture around the globe. For the past decade, he has served as director of nRhythm, which strives to bring life to the systems that connect us all. Tre' is focused now on developing a methodology and approach that brings a life-centered approach to organizations...

Blake Jones is a founder of several cooperative enterprises, including Namaste Solar and Kachuwa Impact Fund. He’s a pioneer in his marrying of the cooperative model and impact investing. Kachuwa Impact Fund is democratically owned and operated by its members. They invest in companies that have a positive impact on the environment and society, and real estate that does the same—such as organic farms and affordable housing. They invest in Main Street as opposed to Wall Street, and impact is their number one priority with financial return being second. 

In this episode, Blake and show host...

Kris Maher is an architect and developer. For over 20 years, she’s worked for the Rancho Mission Viejo community in Orange County, California, where she is currently senior vice president of community development. The master planned community lies on a former cattle ranch, and currently they are developing a 23,000 acre entitlement that will have 14,000 homes in six non-contiguous villages. Almost three-quarters of that land will remain open space surrounding the villages. Kris leads urban planning and community design, with the natural, preserved landscape at the heart of her efforts. “The land is our brand,” she says.

In this e...

Jenny Andersson is a regenerative strategist and educator, and the founder of the Really Regenerative Centre in the UK. With over 30 years of experience working alongside brands, organizations, and communities to inspire sustainable and regenerative initiatives, Jenny believes in "harnessing the power of the collective intelligence of organizations and communities to create visions for the future they want." She believes the world has undergone profound shifts—more billionaires than ever, microplastic pollution, ill soil health—and people are sensing it consciously and unconsciously. They are ready for change. But real change, including creating regional and regenerative economies, requires not only...

Emily Niehaus is a former mayor and a leader in both affordable housing and education. She is the founder of Community Rebuilds, a nonprofit that constructs affordable straw bale homes, and more recently, she’s also the founder of Heron School, a micro-school for gifted neurodiverse students. In between those ventures, she found the time to be the mayor of Moab, Utah, where she was able to advocate for housing policy with a larger platform. Throughout her impressive, varied career, she has been driven by purpose and a “doer” attitude, she says “if I see something that needs fixing, I just t...

Jacob Deva Racusin is a natural building designer, builder, and educator. He is a longtime leader in the field of sustainable building and the co-founder of New Frameworks, a worker-owned cooperative committed to a “kinder sort of building.” Using natural materials such as native hardwood, clay, and stone, they are developing data-driven and scalable solutions for cost-effective, non-toxic, plant based building that can substantially impact our urgent ecological and health crises. Starting as a young person in the punk rock scene, Jacob got involved early on with forward thinking movements around sustainable agriculture and building, and he hasn’t looked...

Paul Rabinovitch is an impact investor, sustainable developer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Net Positive Capital, a fund that seeks to build a channel for capital to flow into net positive real estate. He has decades of experience investing in healthy vibrant places and his career is built on the principle that social benefit and profit are not mutually exclusive. He’s been on the leading edge of the impact investing movement in the United States and is hopeful that the rest of the investment community is finally ready to catch up. Recently he put his years of...

Sean McLean is a visionary in the field of regenerative development. He is a managing partner of MPact Collective, an impact real estate development firm that takes an innovative, long-term approach toward place-based investing. Sean believes that the best way to build a resilient community is to spend months there full-time learning the issues and addressing them in a sustainable way, working on the scale of decades rather than years. He’s creating opportunities to support underserved and underinvested communities that offer impressive returns that can compete with and even exceed those of traditional real estate developments. 

Sea...

Analise Roland is an impact entrepreneur, neuroscientist, and movement leader in the field of regenerative development. She is the CEO of Anura, a real estate fund that aims to generate financial, social, and environmental returns. She has a deep belief that developments based on regenerative principles can produce substantial returns that benefit the investor, but also the local community and natural environment. With this mindset, we can foster a regenerative economy and a system of regenerative capitalism, that challenges the extractive capitalism which has dominated our era. 

Analise and show host Neal explore her diverse background, from h...

Neal and Alissa Collins are partners in business and life, and are co-founders of Latitude Regenerative Real Estate. As Neal recently passed the milestone of publishing the 100th episode of the Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, he and Alissa thought now was a great time for some reflection. Four years after starting the podcast and starting to build the field of Regenerative Real Estate, Neal and Alissa have accumulated a wealth of knowledge from guests and have enjoyed building a community of like-minded change agents. That learning has fed into their own business and profoundly influenced their efforts at feeding...

Doug Davis is a conservation-based real estate developer, self-proclaimed adrenaline junky, and co-founder of The Farm at Okefenokee. It is a legacy project that Doug plans to work on for decades to come, one that combines development and conservation. The Farm is on 705 acres near Folkston, Georgia, and will ultimately have 250 sustainably-built cabins among crop fields and farm animals that will produce high-quality food for its residents. The development is based on principles of regenerative agriculture, conservation, and a belief that a vibrant community needs “body heat”—people interacting in a lively way with each other and the land. 

Do...

Lindsay Baker is a movement leader, author, and podcast host. Currently, she is the CEO of the International Living Future Institute, and her path there has been surprising and impressive. She started her career working at the US Green Building Council developing early standards for LEED, subsequently she was a researcher at UC Berkley, global head of sustainability at WeWork, member of Google’s Real Estate Sustainability Team, and co-founder of a smart buildings company. Throughout her winding career, she has been driven not by a desire to have a particular role but by a desire to effect as mu...

Greg Hale is an expert on high performance and carbon-neutral buildings. He is one of the developers behind the Catskill Project, a 90-acre carbon-neutral community in upstate New York with homes designed to all passive house standards. The community, which is envisioned to eventually have 25 homes, sees itself as exemplifying the “future of living.” Greg has long been a forward thinker in the area of carbon neutral construction, and the Catskills Project is the culmination of a lifetime of environmentalism and sustainable development. 

Greg and show host Neal discuss Greg's path to starting a passive house community, from...

Peter Block is an author, organizational development consultant, and citizen of Cincinnati, Ohio. Among other books, he has written Flawless Consulting, Stewardship, The Answer to How Is Yes, Community, The Abundant Community, and An Other Kingdom. His work has centered around reclaiming our humanity in the relentless modern world. He has a deep belief in the central role that place and our relationship to it plays in our life—our happiness and our health.

Peter and show host Neal discuss Peter's career from one of his earliest and most formative sparks of inspiration, as a graduate student th...

Nathan Helbach is a sustainable developer and the CEO of The Neutral Project. When he was in school working on a degree in sustainability, he came up with the idea to build carbon-neutral developments. Today, with The Neutral Project, he is working to make that dream a reality. Key to reducing the embodied carbon in these buildings was moving away from steel and concrete to mass timber. Currently, Nathan is behind the construction of what will be the tallest mass timber building in the world. 

Nathan and show host Neal discuss Nathan’s path to starting The Neu...

Brandon Welch is the co-founder and CEO of Mad Capital, an investment fund dedicated to helping farmers transition from conventional to regenerative and organic agriculture. Brandon knew he wanted to do something to make a positive impact on society and the environment, and he found that the world of finance was the most powerful way for him to do so.  Conventional practices are so deeply ingrained in the culture of agriculture and business of farms, that it takes a big leap of faith and lots of support for farmers to make the switch to adopt more regenerative practices. Welch a...

Mark Lakeman is an architect, placemaker, and urban planner.  He is the founder and design director of Communitecture, and the co-founder of both the City Repair Project and Village Building Convergence.  He believes that public spaces play a foundational role in human society. However with relatively recent colonial systems they have been subdued and replaced by a grid system that connects cars and commerce but not so much people. Now, he is working to revive them by breaking through the cultural inertia and bureaucracy that works to maintain the status quo.

Mark and show host Neal discuss th...

David Leon is the Co-Founder & Executive Director at Farmer's Footprint and Drew Dumsch is the President & CEO of The Ecology School. They are both inspiring leaders in the regenerative movement and have taken innovative approaches to funding their projects. Although the topics of profit and capital can make many in the regenerative world queasy, the reality is that funding is a foundational element to most ambitious initiatives. And just like how society's ideas about food production and community can be revolutionized with the ideals of regeneration, so can its ideas about capital and financing.

This is the...

David Todd is a longtime designer, green living innovator, and realtor. Now he is Partner and Co-Head of Community at Latitude Regenerative Real Estate. He began practicing regenerative real estate in Portland many years before that phrase entered anyone's vocabulary and he's passionate about bringing like-minded people together to accomplish big things. Now, he lives in Kingston, New York, where he is continuing his mission to empower agents and real estate professionals to be catalysts for healing our relationship to home, place, and planet.

David and show host Neal discuss David's long and winding path to eventually...

Mel Meagher is the founder of Unfold Development, a values-driven design and development studio specializing in regenerative thinking. After spending a decade working in a more conventional real estate setting, Mel realized just how disconnected humans have become from our environment–in particular, the harmful impact that our built environments, materials and construction practices have on the earth and on our health. 

Mel and show host Neal discuss how Mel’s career led them to completely rethink real estate development, as well as their inspirations behind founding Unfold. Mel details Unfold’s current projects, and how they and the...

Jacob Waddell is the president of the Hemp Building Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to researching and promoting healthy and sustainable building practices. The way we construct our built environment has been a major cause of today’s most pressing environmental and health problems. Moving away from conventional construction materials to those that are more natural is a promising solution that’s only now starting to catch on in the U.S. 

Jacob and show host Neil discuss Jacob’s path to working with hemp, including his time studying material science and working with plastics before he had a r...

Greg Peterson is a green-living innovator, educator, and podcast host. His life vision, which has guided him for more than 30 years, is "I am the person on the planet responsible for transforming our global food system." Greg was introduced to permaculture in the 1990s and was quickly inspired to spread its basic ideals of sustainability and working with nature. In 2001, Greg created the Urban Farm, a real world environmental showcase home in Phoenix, Arizona, where people could learn about permaculture principles and see first hand how they can be applied to homes.

Greg and show host Neal...

Scott Snodgrass is an entrepreneur, farmer, and land developer. He's started a number of businesses, including Edible Earth Resources, a productive landscapes company; Agmenity, a community farm developer; and most recently Meristem Communities, a real estate development firm focusing on "places for people." He and his business partner Clayton Garrett are working on their first big community project near Houston, called Indigo.

Scott and show host Neal discuss Scott's path to "places for people"-focused real estate, including how he first stumbled into farming after coffee growers in Nicaragua asked him for help with their crops.  They t...

James Ehrlich is a technology and media entrepreneur. He's the founder of ReGen Villages, a tech-driven company that seeks to design regenerative communities focused on food, water, energy, and circular waste management.  He's also the director of compassionate sustainability at Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research.  James uses his lifetime of experience with video games, television story-telling, and tech to create engaging software that can help people build resilient and integrated villages that make the best use of their unique land.

James and show host Neal discuss how James background in media set the stage fo...

Matt Morley is a Europe-based biophilic designer, entrepreneur, and podcaster. He is the founder of Biofilico and Biofit Health & Fitness, and the host of the Green Healthy Places podcast. He’s passionate about biophilic, healthy spaces and finding and bringing together other people leading innovative initiatives in the world of sustainability—which he gets to do with his podcast.  

As this interview is also being published on Matt’s podcast, he and show host Neal interview each other. They both talk about their background and what led them into a life of fusing entrepreneurship and sustainability. They talk ab...

Tres Crow is a writer, artist, and designer. He's the president of Roots Down, an environmental education firm dedicated to helping governments, non-profits, and communities transform their expensive, labor-intensive green areas into productive urban landscapes. Tres and his colleagues at Roots Down argue that, with the right education, landscapers can change their practices, save money and make landscapes more sustainable.

Show host Neal and Tres discuss how the landscaping industry has largely been left out of larger conversations about sustainability and regeneration. Tres dispels the misconception that ecological landscaping costs more than traditional landscaping, and he describes...

Jay Standish is an entrepreneur and co-founder of OpenDoor Coliving. For nearly ten years with that company, he was a pioneer in the business of professionally-run community housing. OpenDoor started by leasing a single home and eventually came to operate over 400 units in three states. In December of 2022, Jay and his business partner Ben Provan closed the business after a challenging, but successful run. 

Jay and show host Neal discuss Jay's first major experiences with nature and the outdoors—40 day canoe expeditions in Canada that he did as a teenager. Since then, Jay has lov...

Jo Petroni is an architect based in rural France, and she is the founder of Permarchitecture. She believes in "listening to your land," which is a way to observe the land where we live and build with curiosity and humility—and ultimately reconnect with nature. Jo is also an illustrator and climate change communicator. She is a co-creator of and contributor to the Carbon Almanac and she has an "Epistolary" of letters to imaginary friends published on Substack.

Jo and show host Neal discussed how Jo aspired to be an architect since she was a young child, th...

Michael D. Ham is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and president of Wild Orchard Regenerative Teas and RePure. He sees the pandemic as culturally transformative and believes that now is the time to move beyond "sustainable" and "net-zero" to "regenerative" and "net-positive." With his tea company, he wants to make the highest quality tea available, grown on a regenerative farm and free of all the toxins that contaminate industrial produced teas. And with his new venture, RePure, he wants to provide an in-home "OS" that can monitor the air, water, and light health of our indoor spaces. 

M...

Dorn Cox is a regenerative farmer, technologist, and the research director for the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment in Freeport, Maine. He is the author of The Great Regeneration: Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope. Dorn believes that technology's incredible ability to distribute information at little to no cost holds immense power to change our relationship to the environment for the better. By harnessing the power of open source technology, regenerative solutions can spread at a global scale.

Show host Neal and Dorn talk about his family's multi-generation farming tr...

Hillarie Maddox is an entrepreneur, homesteader, and the creator of Black Girl Country Living—a magazine and podcast. Her work is all about helping people "return home to Mama Nature," through media, storytelling, and re-wilding experiences. Moving to the country and growing food during the pandemic was a life-changing experience for her and her family, and now she wants to give that to others.

Hillarie and show host Neal discuss their shared home of Whidbey Island in Puget Sound and how Hillarie's family adjusted to life there during the pandemic. They discuss how empowering it's been for Hi...