Ali Wolf is not afraid to try something new—in her personal or work life—even if it involves a bit of fear or discomfort. As Zonda’s chief economist, she’s always looking at data in a new way, trying to work out what it all means to people’s everyday lives and how to present that information so it makes sense.
In her personal life, that means learning how to play guitar (even if that means blisters on her fingers), traveling solo across Africa, attending heavy metal concerts in between speaking gigs, or tackling big career challenges that scare her a little.
Economics is in Wolf’s blood. When she was a kid, her mom was the Ohio bureau chief of Bloomberg News—which meant she was the only Bloomberg employee in the state and ran the “bureau” from a room in their house on a farm in rural Ohio. She recalls her mom being unable to pick her up at school because she had an earnings call to listen to or taking Wolf to picket about events she wasn’t happy about.
From Chicken Coops to Economics
Wolf jokes that she got her first exposure to the home-building industry by helping her mom build a chicken coop on their farm, which also had horses, cats, dogs, birds, ducks, and a crazy rooster.
While attending The Ohio State University, Wolf took Economics 101, and she was taken by the description that “economics is the efficient allocation of resources.”
“To me, I don’t think there is a better sentence that describes who I am,” she says, noting she’s doing a phone interview while walking on the treadmill. “What is the best use of your time, or what is the best use of whatever resource you have? It just made so much sense. It was that mantra sentence that sealed the deal for me.”
Add in the complexities of human behavior and how that “ruined all of the economic theory that you were taught,” and Wolf was hooked. “It was cool to have a technical skill set but then have a practical use of it and how you have to figure out how those two things work together.”
Her interest in housing economics fell off the shelf and into Wolf’s lap. During her undergraduate studies, Wolf would go to the economics section of the bookstore and pull volumes off the shelf to read in her spare time. Before a trip to Hawaii, she picked up a book called "The Housing Boom and Bust" by Thomas Sowell for something to read on the beach. After her vacation, Wolf started her housing economics class—and the book she’d read was the class textbook.
Housing economics sparked Wolf’s interest, particularly in how and why people make certain decisions. “How does everything in the economy tie back to what’s happening in the housing market?”
That passion led Wolf to pursue a master’s degree in economics and finance with a specialty in real estate at the London School of Economics. This led to her first job as a real estate research analyst for a consulting firm in California—a dream location for someone from Ohio who had been living in London. Wolf got that job offer following graduation, jumped on a plane, and moved within two weeks.
White House Comes Calling
A few years later, Jeff Meyers from Meyers Research (now Zonda) called to ask Wolf if she would be interested in making a move. But Wolf repeatedly said, "No." Tim Sullivan, now chief advisory officer at Zonda but senior managing principal at Meyers at the time, got on a call and asked, “What’s your big objection?”
Wolf’s current role was at an established firm. At that time, Meyers “was more or less a startup,” she says.
“They were like, we want you to create this department out of nothing. And I was so scared that I think that’s why I didn’t do it,” she says. “Then finally, Tim says, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if you were able to create something from nothing?’ And I was like, ‘You know what? Yes.’”
Wolf took that leap nine years ago, and, since then, Meyers Research has become Zonda.
That new role gave Wolf a challenge—and a chance to showcase her unique talents. One mentor told her to start posting on social media to get her name out there, highlight the company’s data, and gain the media’s attention. It worked.
In 2021, a podcast appearance and interviews with various reporters led to a request to write an opinion piece for The New York Times. Wolf dropped everything, wrote the piece, and it was promptly published. That evening, she got the most intriguing message from the White House asking her if she could attend a housing symposium discussion. “I thought it was fake. How could you not?”
She presented at the symposium and has consulted regularly with the White House on housing policy ever since. “For what I do, that’s about as high as you can go to report what you’re seeing in the housing market,” she says.
Lessons From Fitness Class
Wolf is a regular keynote speaker at hundreds of events and conferences annually. Her industry colleagues say she is the best presenter out there. Robert Dietz, senior vice president and chief economist with the NAHB and one of Wolf’s mentors, who is also on the White House roundtable, says she has been the headline speaker at the forecast session at the association’s annual trade show for the past few years.
“Her presentation style and content are popular with the builder attendees,” he says. The indices she’s brought to the industry, such as pending new home sales and lot availability, are essential.
“She’s a valued voice for the industry on data items, policy issues, and as a forecaster,” he says. “A good economist is going to be one that likes the data but also really likes looking at how the data tells stories about people.”
Wolf is also in the field, talking to big and small industry players and learning about their challenges, from supply issues to skilled labor shortages. “She’s engaged in those efforts, which speaks to her dedication to the industry,” he says.
But at the start of her career, public speaking was not Wolf’s forte. “That, to me, was the epitome of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. I was so uncomfortable with all of that,” she says.
She credits the fitness classes she taught when she arrived in California—she joined the classes to meet new people and then got accredited to teach them—with helping her get used to speaking in front of an audience.
Some days, the microphone or stereo wouldn’t work, the class attitude was terrible, or you had a bad day or were sweating through your clothes, she says. “It forced you to not only get over your fear of public speaking but to get over yourself and also learn to adapt.”
Wolf says she’s scared of most things she’s done, but she gets over it by practicing and being overprepared—from public speaking to board presentations to posing on social media and meetings at the White House. Her advice? “Do what scares you. You may surprise yourself.”
Sullivan says Wolf is one of the best public speakers “because she practices, practices, practices, the same way you get to Carnegie Hall, she has practiced, and she’s refined her craft.”
Wolf and her team have created new reports that help people understand the U.S. housing market. These include the New Home Market Update, the Lot Supply Index, which looks at land and lot data, and a new report called the National Outlook, which synthesizes Zonda’s data with a monthly analysis.
“It’s so wide-reaching what housing does for the wider economy,” Wolf says, including employment and sales at real estate firms, banks, loan and escrow companies, and furniture and appliance retailers.
'She's a Rock and Roll Chick'
Zonda’s vision is to find more ways to collect and understand data and consumer information from sources, including satellite imagery and websites. “We’re trying to get better insights, to get into the mind of the consumer through some of the information that’s available to us, but in different ways than what’s been done in the past,” she says.
Wolf is a true collaborator, says Sullivan. She is fun to work with and never takes pride in ownership. “She constantly looks for a better way to analyze things,” he says, and her curiosity and inquisitiveness “is what makes her so darn good at what she does. She makes us all smarter.”
She has “an unquenchable thirst to see new things” and an interest in music. She is “a rock and roll chick. She loves heavy metal,” Sullivan says, noting that Wolf has often found concerts to attend when she’s speaking at events across the United States. Her pursuit of learning how to play guitar comes from that passion, he adds.
Sean Fergus, who had previously worked with Wolf, joined Zonda a year ago as the executive director of economic research. He says Wolf is “one of my favorite people, if not my favorite person in the industry.”
Not only is Wolf fun to work with, “she is super easy to get along with, but also on a professional level, she’s just brilliant and looks at things a different way from a lot of people,” he says. While he’s a “data, quantitative person,” Wolf always looks through a different lens and asks, “What are we not seeing? What are we missing?”
She’s also a fun and competitive colleague, he adds and dominated mini golf at a recent work event.
“She takes her competitive and hard-working mentality to everything she does,” he says.
If Wolf isn’t in California, where she lives with her husband and three cats—Chanel, Hermes, and Vera—watching Formula One racing, or traveling to speak at events across the nation, you’ll find her traveling on her own across the globe. Most recently, she’s been traveling across Central Africa, and she says Egypt is her favorite place so far.
She’s already been to North and West Africa. Next on the list is East Africa and maybe Mongolia. Not everyone likes to or has the time to travel, so Wolf doesn’t wait.
“I’m not going to put my life on hold,” she says. “So, I just go.”
