Candice Williams
Candice Williams connects business and development decisions to the way housing, retail and major projects reshape properties and streetscapes, treating real estate as part of broader economic change. She is a business and development reporter at the Detroit News and has reported there since 2003, with a beat that centers on real estate, housing markets and development. Her recent work ranges from housing inventory and mortgage costs to corporate redevelopment deals and luxury home sales, giving a clear view of how capital moves through land and buildings.
Housing Market Trends and Luxury Sales
Williams reports closely on housing market conditions, including a recent story on how home buyers are facing higher inventory and mortgage rates in the Detroit area. In that coverage she uses market data and expert commentary to spell out how changing rates and listing volumes affect buyer decisions and overall demand. She extends this lens to the upper end of the market, writing about Michigan’s priciest homes and examining how affluent buyers are pursuing larger, high-end properties as part of a busy luxury sales environment.
Her housing pieces tend to balance numbers with lived impact, translating pricing trends and financing shifts into what they mean for people trying to buy or sell.
Corporate Projects, Incentives and Redevelopment
A significant part of Williams’s beat centers on major corporate real estate moves and the incentive structures around them.
She covers projects involving large companies and prominent developers, including a piece on GM and Bedrock’s tax incentive request tied to redevelopment of the Renaissance Center complex. In that work she tracks how public incentives, private investment and redevelopment plans intersect, detailing the scale of proposed changes and the financial mechanisms that underpin them.
Her real estate coverage also follows the reuse of existing buildings, such as a century-old structure brought back into circulation as apartments, showing how redevelopment turns underused property into new housing while preserving a historic footprint. She treats these stories as business narratives as much as property stories, outlining who is backing a project, how it is financed and what kind of return or transformation it aims to deliver.
Retail Corridors and Neighborhood Revitalization
Williams writes frequently about efforts to attract retail and reshape commercial corridors, connecting storefront activity to broader development strategies. In a story on how Detroit is trying to bring in more retail, she follows the creation of a dedicated retail attraction role and reports on recruitment of national brands, regional retailers and grocery stores to neighborhood commercial areas.
That piece highlights how landlords and real estate firms influence the retail mix, and how long-term approaches from companies such as Bedrock frame the timing and character of new tenants. Her coverage of neighborhoods includes work on areas like Corktown, where she has chronicled new developments alongside restoration projects such as the Kaul Glove Building, tracing how investment changes the feel and function of long-standing districts.
The reopened historic building with new apartments fits into the same thread, with Williams showing how revitalization can blend preservation, new housing stock and emerging commercial activity in a single property story.
Community Perspectives on Development
Across her work, Williams brings community voices into the conversation about development, documenting how residents react to the pace and tone of change. Earlier reporting on a controversial development poster associated with Bedrock included coverage of a group of Detroiters posing for a new photograph at the same site, presenting a more diverse image and underscoring concerns about representation and messaging around redevelopment. In her retail and housing stories she quotes landlords, local officials and business leaders to show how different stakeholders perceive new investment and what they expect it to deliver.
Her profiles of neighborhood projects and adaptive reuse frequently return to questions of who benefits, how inclusive the development is and how it fits into long-term visions for the area, giving communications and policy actors a clear sense of the debates that surround real estate deals.
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.