Background & experience
Maria Machin is a director at ESI where she guides economic impact analysis and strategic financial modeling for public sector agencies, quasi-public institutions, and private organizations. Her direction has enhanced project success in the firm’s economic development, real estate, and urban planning service areas. Leveraging extensive experience through varied fields, she brings a practical, proven approach to complex development questions, focused on outcomes and solutions to help clients make expert-informed decisions.
Maria plays a key role in delivering market research, fiscal impact analysis, real estate pro forma modeling, and spatial data visualization for communities and institutions navigating growth, reinvestment, and evolving market conditions. Her work helps clients quantify the value of development initiatives, evaluate tradeoffs across policy and investment alternatives, and align strategies with measurable outcomes.
Maria’s portfolio of services includes real estate feasibility and scenario modeling, market studies and economic development planning reports. Her experience spans a wide range of project types, including housing market studies, industrial and commercial asset evaluations, and assessments of public-private development opportunities. Across these engagements, she brings fluency in industry-standard tools along with a clear emphasis on delivering decision-ready insights that are grounded in data and tailored to the realities of local governance, market conditions, and implementation capacity.
Maria earned a Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, with a concentration in public and private development, and holds a Certificate in Real Estate Design and Development. She is a member of the Urban Land Institute and the American Planning Association. Maria is fluent in Spanish and understands the importance of communicating ideas to a wide audience, bridging the gap between varying stakeholder groups. She shares her techniques and processes through writing on topics such as land use policy and housing affordability, including contributions for ESI’s blog, Present Value.
