Billy Wadsack
Billy Wadsack covers commercial real estate through the lens of how money, tenants and policy reshape the Dallas-Fort Worth market across asset classes. His reporting blends transaction detail with market context, tracking both marquee corporate moves and the quieter deal flow that signals where capital is going next. He is Bisnow’s Dallas-Fort Worth reporter, contributes to the newsletter The Texas Tea, and brings more than two decades of prior reporting and editing experience to the beat.
Dallas-Fort Worth Commercial Real Estate Beat
Wadsack’s beat centers on commercial real estate in Dallas-Fort Worth, with coverage spanning office, industrial, retail, multifamily and mixed-use development. Recent work ranges from an office tower plan in Uptown Dallas backed by Morgan Stanley to a new regional hub investment by the firm, highlighting his focus on large corporate occupiers and their footprint decisions.
He tracks distress alongside growth, such as a downtown Dallas office tower facing foreclosure due to an unpaid $79M loan, giving equal attention to risk and opportunity in the local market.
His long-form pieces examine themes like adaptability among commercial real estate leaders as the DFW market expands, showing an interest in how strategy and leadership evolve with changing conditions. He joined Bisnow in August 2024 after more than 20 years at daily, weekly and monthly publications in Texas and Louisiana, and that tenure reads through in his emphasis on clear sourcing and specific, numbers-driven storytelling.
DFW Deal Sheet And Investment Coverage
A defining feature of Wadsack’s output is recurring “DFW Deal Sheet” coverage, where he compiles and explains recent sales, acquisitions, leases and financings across the metro.
These columns have detailed items on distribution facilities sold by Scannell Properties, net lease REIT purchases of newly delivered distribution centers in Mesquite, and retail centers acquired by Whitestone REIT near a World Cup site. He follows investment activity at the owner and capital-markets level, including Harwood selling multiple buildings while securing a $100M construction loan, and a September spike that pushed third-quarter investment volume up 16%.
His stories track capital formation as well as deployment, such as Artisan Partners expanding into real estate through a private equity firm acquisition and MCB raising its bid in a Whitestone REIT buyout proposal. Across these pieces he highlights deal size, buyer and seller profiles, financing structures and timing, making his coverage a regular log of who is spending, exiting or repositioning assets in DFW.
Industrial Growth, Retail Rents And Market Fundamentals
Industrial and logistics are a recurring subtheme in Wadsack’s reporting, from incentives to land a nearly $200M Harting Connectivity plant to the challenge of entering DFW industrial as costs rise.
He documents how Tarrant County’s growth is making the Fort Worth side of the metro more attractive to investors, tying capital flows to demographic and infrastructure trends. Retail coverage looks closely at performance and pricing, including DFW’s top malls drawing more visitors and rising in value, and retail rents skyrocketing in the region’s northern suburbs where tenants continue to pay up for well-located space.
He uses master-planned communities and large mixed-use projects to illustrate fundamentals, with pieces on Hillwood’s 3,200-acre community in Denton and Centurion American’s Preston Harbor project underlining how scale developments anchor growth corridors. Articles like “‘Like Jazz’: Collin County’s Fundamentals Allow MPC Developers To Get Creative” show him linking tenant mix, land availability and developer strategy to broader questions about how far the current expansion can run.
Policy, Incentives And Emerging Sectors
Wadsack regularly reports on how policy and public incentives intersect with real estate outcomes, such as Fort Worth offering incentives to land a major connectivity plant and Southern Dallas securing a $23.5M city grant for a mixed-use project. His coverage of the OZ 2.0 program focuses on how revised Opportunity Zone rules could bring “enormous money” into DFW, tying federal policy to local investment pipelines.
He follows public-sector real estate decisions, including Dallas weighing options for City Hall as repair bills climb toward $345M, and examines how those choices influence downtown and civic asset strategy. Emerging sectors and technology feature in pieces on OpenAI ramping up data center development plans, construction tech firm Kahua receiving a $1B valuation through Bain Capital’s investment, and a federal bill that could reshape the hemp industry.
He also covers corporate job cuts at firms like Amazon and UPS in the context of office efficiency drives, and writes on women commercial real estate leaders stressing adaptability as the market grows, showing an interest in workforce dynamics and leadership alongside bricks-and-mortar activity.
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.
Abbey Ferguson
Abbey Ferguson stands out for reporting how major commercial moves and redevelopment plans reshape the built environment, especially the real estate deals that reveal what land and retail space are worth. She covers Central Texas commercial real estate and development for KWTX, with recent stories on land valuation, major transactions, retail redevelopment, and infrastructure planning. Her work has tracked an $80 million data center site offer in Hill County, a prospective Trader Joe’s location in Waco, and a planning project using artificial intelligence to predict traffic patterns. She writes as a news reporter, staying close to the numbers, public records, brokers, officials, and landowners. Her stories turn contract prices, appraisal data, and listing history into plain explanations of what buyers are betting on and how those deals affect surrounding property owners and nearby businesses.