Hortense Leon is a freelance writer based in Miami. She has been a business journalist for nearly 30 years and has been covering the commercial real estate market for 20 of those years. She started her career in journalism as a fact-checker at Playboy magazine in Chicago in the 1970s, where her assignments ran the gamut from checking Playboy of the Month bios to verifying information in the famous Jimmy Carter interview of 1976.

More recently, her work has appeared in National Real Estate Investor, Retail Traffic, REALTOR and Real Estate Forum magazines, among other media. In 2010, she was editor for the Southeast at Globest.com and is a regular contributor to Mortgage Banking magazine. She holds a B.A in English literature from Indiana University.