Abbey Ferguson
Abbey Ferguson covers how major commercial moves and redevelopment plans reshape the built environment, with a focus on real estate deals that test what land and retail space are worth in Central Texas.
Real estate deals and land valuation pressure
Her reporting tracks standout transactions where the price per acre or square foot departs sharply from recent appraisals and past sales, treating each deal as a signal of how fast local values are moving. In coverage of the proposed data center site in Hill County, she breaks down an $80 million offer into a roughly $100,000-per-acre valuation, contrasting it with county appraisal data and prior use of the land to show just how far the market has jumped.
She stays close to the numbers in these stories, tying contract price, appraisal records, and prior listing history into plain-language explanations of what buyers are betting on and what that means for surrounding property owners.
Retail redevelopment and national brands
Ferguson returns often to the question of which national retail brands come into, leave, or reshuffle their footprint in Central Texas and what happens to the real estate they occupy. In her report on a prospective Trader Joe’s location in Waco, she follows a local real estate agent’s look at an old big-box building, using the broker’s interest to examine how former large-format retail properties are being repositioned for new tenants. She uses these kinds of stories to show how older shopping corridors might be revived or repurposed, and how speculation about a single tenant can ripple through nearby landlords, small businesses, and neighborhood expectations.
Infrastructure, planning, and development context
Beyond individual deals, Ferguson pays attention to the planning and infrastructure decisions that frame where new investment goes. In her coverage of a metropolitan planning organization’s grant project that uses artificial intelligence to predict traffic patterns, she links future road and mobility changes to likely development corridors and investment interest.
These pieces connect transportation planning and public funding to the private real estate decisions she covers elsewhere, giving readers a sense of how long-range infrastructure work can set up the next wave of commercial and residential projects.
Reporting style and format
Ferguson writes as a news reporter for the local television newsroom, building her real estate coverage around clear leads, concise explanations of deal terms, and quotes from brokers, officials, and landowners. Her work tends to stay close to specific properties and transactions rather than broad market commentary, using concrete examples to show larger trends.
Across recent stories, she maintains a straightforward, fact-driven tone that emphasizes verifiable figures, public records, and on-the-record sources to explain why a particular piece of land or building is suddenly at the center of attention.
4 more real estate journalists.
Aaron Elstein
Aaron Elstein brings a Wall Street reporter’s eye to commercial real estate. He is a senior reporter at Crain’s New York Business, where he covers large office towers, Midtown corridors, landlords, lenders, investors and regulators. His reporting shows how ownership decisions, bank balance sheets, capital markets and regulation shape property values and risk. He also covers banking, finance and Wall Street, including bank mergers and investment firms. Before joining Crain’s in 2003, he wrote Heard on the Street columns for The Wall Street Journal and covered bank mergers for American Banker. Elstein reports by closely reading footnotes, contracts, regulatory filings and legal documents. His investigative work has examined executive payments, pension funds, tax enforcement and tenant harassment. His coverage places deals, disputes and enforcement actions within broader financial and property cycles.
Aaron Moselle
Aaron Moselle covers housing and community development for WHYY’s PlanPhilly, filing for radio and the web. He stands out for connecting market data and government action to displacement, affordable homes, and the daily questions facing renters and homeowners. His core beat is housing affordability and market strain, including high mortgage rates, rising prices, tax assessments, and what they mean for buyers, sellers, and renters. He also reports on preserving and creating affordable housing, neighborhood rehab efforts, major real estate deals, and the effect of property sales on residents. His work often uses direct sourcing, plain language, and service journalism to make policy and finance clear.
Aarthi Swaminathan
Aarthi Swaminathan is a personal finance reporter at MarketWatch whose distinctive beat connects residential real estate with household budgets. She covers housing prices, affordability, mortgage rates, financing, insurance, remodeling and the costs of owning a home. Her reporting examines overvalued and fast-rising markets, ZIP-code trends, second-home sellers, builders, developers and buyers facing higher borrowing costs. She also follows Gen Z buyers, owners trapped in weakening condo markets and neighborhood conflicts over development. Her work pairs data-driven housing analysis with detailed case studies of buyers, owners and sellers. She explains complex market data in clear, accessible language and writes news features, personal-finance explainers, Economic Report stories, The Big Move and New American Playbook. She won a silver award for Best Collection of Work by an Individual Covering Residential Real Estate.
Abby Miller
Abby Miller reports on how development, housing policy and major projects reshape neighborhoods, including who benefits and who is left out. She is a money reporter covering development at the Chicago Sun-Times, with expertise in housing, construction and large-scale commercial projects. Her beat includes South and West Side housing initiatives, equitable transit-oriented development, office-to-residential conversions, Loop recovery, neighborhood planning, historic preservation, demolition fights and housing market pressures. She also covers projects such as The 78, West Loop towers and major community developments. Miller pairs project costs, funding, vacancy rates, sales figures and construction data with the views of residents, advocates, developers and officials. She explains how policies become homes, community spaces and changes to individual blocks, while examining affordability, supply, access and the future of neighborhoods.