Here are the 10 people transforming real estate from the mayor of Atlanta, to the cofounder of Icon

Barkley spends most of her day trying to help people overcome the hurdles they've faced in buying their own home. In the Dallas metro area, where she's based, Barkley hears about the need for this kind of help in everyday interactions.

One day, Barkley, who heads Bank of America's neighborhood and community lending, struck up a conversation with a restaurant waiter. The waiter, who had dreamed about homeownership and who'd seen TV ads about BofA's efforts in the area, asked Barkley more about the program, and she left the waiter her business card.

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Brunner has made it her personal mission to help fill the racial and economic wealth gaps in the US through home ownership.

After being appointed as the president and CEO of The Port, a government entity in charge of community and economic development in Cincinnati, in 2011, Brunner made a big splash this year with a plan to combat the growing ownership of homes by institutional real-estate investors, instead of the local residents.

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Dickens, 48, put real-estate developers in Atlanta on notice when he became the city's 61st mayor in January.

Since joining the Atlanta City Council as an at-large representative in 2014, Dickens has passed legislation requiring developers to preserve units for people who otherwise couldn't afford them. He also championed Atlanta's short-term-rental ordinance, which requires rental owners to pay a $150 annual fee and an 8% lodging tax like hotels.

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Home values have skyrocketed over the past two years, which means Americans have more money tied up in their homes than ever before. In the second quarter of 2022, homeowner equity reached a record $29 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.

Lim, the CEO and cofounder of Point, wants to make it easier for people to tap into that wealth. Lim's company, which he founded alongside Eoin Matthews in 2015, offers homeowners lump sums of cash in exchange for a stake in their home.

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Homeowners get the benefits of wealth creation and building credit histories, while renters pay to keep a roof over their heads — until now. Liu is leading the charge of getting renters some well-deserved benefits.

Liu, 39, is the founder and CEO of Piñata, a company that offers rewards and credit reporting for rental payments. She helps renters get something back for paying rent on time, a financial responsibility that has gone largely unnoticed in a housing market where ownership has always been the path to greater wealth.

Her efforts are resonating with consumers, because a three-bedroom home with a white picket fence is no longer the American dream for everyone.

"Today, renters are often renting not just because it's their life predicament, but it's a choice," Liu told Insider.

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Housing on the moon? Loomis is working on it.

But first, he's set on tackling the housing shortage here on earth. Loomis is a cofounder of Icon, an Austin, Texas-based construction-technology company that aims to make homebuilding faster, cheaper, and more sustainable by 3D-printing homes.

Loomis is a tech evangelist for the homebuilding industry, which he said needs to move past the traditional methods companies have employed for decades.

"Because homebuilding hasn't adopted robotics, software, or advanced materials, it's stuck in an old paradigm," Loomis said. "That's why we're so passionate about this — because we're going to 'unstick' it and bring it into 2022, and hopefully lead the future with this technology."

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Paynter used to be the guy you went to at Gensler to talk about mass timber construction, a lower-carbon alternative to concrete and steel structures. But in the past two years, he's gone in a completely different direction.

Paynter's become the San Francisco-based international architecture firm's foremost voice on office-to-multifamily residential conversions — a timely turn given the impact of the pandemic on the commercial-real-estate market.

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Smithies heads the world's largest real-estate-tech climate fund at Fifth Wall, with $500 million of capital ready to be deployed to decarbonize buildings, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the world.

Smithies, who never planned to work in real estate, left BMW's climate-focused venture fund, iVentures, for an even bigger challenge than lowering transportation-related emissions. Buildings make up 40% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, but they have received a mere 6% of climate-venture investment, according to Fifth Wall.

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Watkins turned around her first vacant property as a 16-year-old community organizer on Long Island, New York. She rallied with other teens and negotiated with a local bank to turn an abandoned home in Roosevelt into a thriving community center for local youth.

She harnesses that same spirit in running the Center for Community Progress, a 12-year-old nonprofit in Flint, Michigan, and Washington, DC, that aims to turn "vacant space into vibrant spaces" across the country.

The center gets about 150 to 200 inquiries every year, Watkins said. Often, the person behind a call or email is an elected official at their wit's end over how to salvage a house fallen into disrepair or repurpose a vacant lot.

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Williams, the executive chairman and cofounder of the real-estate-investing platform Cadre, learned the power of real-estate ownership while growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His parents couldn't afford to buy a home, and Williams saw "clear differences" between the lifestyles of renters like his parents and those with equity in housing.

This created a single-minded focus on real-estate ownership while he was studying to become an investment banker at Harvard during the last financial crisis. He witnessed the messy entanglements of businesses and homeowners firsthand during a trip to Atlanta, where foreclosures were decimating communities.

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