About Strata
Strata has been advising towns, owners, and investors since 1997, long enough to learn that good real estate decisions are never about one discipline. They’re about how the market, the money, and the place fit together, and whether anyone in the room can see all three at once. That’s the seat we take.
The firm
Since its founding, Strata has advised across the full spread of the business: cities and towns, privatized real estate, developers and investors. Repositioning tired assets. Testing feasibility before the commitment. Spotting the trend while it was still a signal. Structuring deals so they hold up in front of the people writing the checks. The disciplines never changed; the map did.
The pivot started inside one town. Advising one small town over the course of a year, Monica saw the gap up close: the town was working to attract young people and new businesses, and no one had the full picture of the assets it offered. At the same time, people of all generations started to understand they could live anywhere. But where?
So she built MoxieTowns, a community driven discovery platform, so that people who can now live anywhere can find the town that fits them. And the research kept confirming it: people, capital, and ambition moving toward small places, with very little serious advisory moving alongside. The pivot was deliberate: decades of counsel for institutional clients and developers, now pointed at the moment of a generation for small towns.
Strategic foresight
Foresight isn’t a crystal ball. It’s a discipline. Reading the signals early, thinking in scenarios instead of certainties, and positioning clients so the future helps them instead of surprising them. It runs through every engagement.
The shift is real: remote work has untethered people from the big metros, technology keeps putting big-market tools within a small town’s grasp, and the old paradigms of where opportunity lives are being rewritten. Whole new possibilities are open to small places bold enough to claim them.
Sometimes foresight is simply telling the truth with care: change is coming either way. What a town gets to choose is how, and what to keep, because charm and scale are part of the magic, and what comes next.
Demographic drift, infrastructure dollars, work patterns, lifestyle options, capital appetite. Tracked before they’re headlines.
Not one forecast defended to the death, but a range of futures, and what each one would ask of you.
The move to make now, so you’re standing where opportunity lands, with the math to justify standing there.
“I can see over the horizon a bit farther than most. Not all. Enough to make a difference.”
Monica Hagewood, CRE
Investment readiness · our point of view
Readiness is visible. A place that feels clean, welcoming, and safe. A Main Street treated as a priority. A treasured heart. A clear path to investment. Housing that belongs within the town pattern.
Small signals reveal whether a place is ready for what it says it wants.
Read the full point of view →
The founder
The founder
The six layers came from somewhere.
Monica Hagewood, CRE · Founder & Principal
She understands the places and the math behind them: a generalist by conviction who sees how the layers fit together, and who knows which subject experts each project needs at the table. She is a Counselor of Real Estate (CRE), an invitation-only designation held by a small body of advisors worldwide.
The path · she built her career in the same six layers, one at a time
Landscape architecture led to historic preservation and adaptive reuse: work grounded in human scale, enduring materials, and the relationship between a building and the street.
An MBA concentrated in commercial real estate led to institutional asset management, with responsibility for more than $600 million across multiple asset types, and a working understanding of what motivates debt and equity.
Multifamily experience and nationwide assignments built fluency across markets, development patterns, and the ways different real estate uses fit together today.
After founding Strata, Monica advised Wall Street clients on market conditions and deals that were not performing as expected. There is much to learn from what goes wrong.
Eight years of downtown development authority service brought the work home: aligning leadership, using public/private partnerships well, supporting local business, and moving a vision toward execution.
A career spent watching places, markets, and lifestyles change now informs a clear conviction: small towns have an opening unlike any in recent memory.
Why “Alliance”
The name isn’t decoration. Strata stays deliberately small: no junior armies, no overhead padding. We build the right team around each engagement from a trusted alliance of subject experts. You get a generalist who sees the whole picture, plus precisely the depth the project demands. Nothing more, nothing missing.
Monica leads every engagement. The person you meet is the person doing the thinking.
Asset specialists, designers, engineers, capital and legal specialists, brought in when the work calls for them, not billed when it doesn’t.
Specialist input is most useful if someone integrates it. That’s the generalist’s craft.
Why we do this
Strata and MoxieTowns are one in commitment: championing small towns in public, advising them one-on-one, and learning, town by town, what helps small places grow. The future is for the bold and visionary. We’re already looking there.
A Strata initiative
MoxieTowns is Strata’s growing atlas of the most remarkable small towns, set on a public discovery platform: a town-by-town record of what each place offers from three perspectives: Discover, Prosper, and Dwell. The data behind it runs far deeper than the town profiles. When Strata advises a town, we bring this unique perspective to the table.
Learn more about the MoxieTowns advantage →
