Elizabeth Schanz
Elizabeth Schanz covers real estate and luxury lifestyle stories for Crain’s Cleveland Business, with a consistent focus on how properties, projects and place-based investments reshape business and community life. Her reporting brings together development, philanthropy and the built environment, from high-end residential listings and amenity-rich complexes to nonprofit campus upgrades and downtown plans. She also covers health care, biotech and nonprofits for Crain’s Cleveland Business, reflecting a beat that spans physical assets and the organizations that operate within them.
Real estate projects, redevelopment and land use
Schanz’s real estate work ranges from individual luxury properties to large-scale redevelopment efforts. In Cleveland, she has covered a sprawling estate property marketed around its luxury barn home and year-round equestrian facilities, treating the listing as a business asset as much as a lifestyle purchase. Her Detroit-area coverage includes an amenities-filled luxury apartment complex opening in West Bloomfield, where she details on-site features and the positioning of the building within the local multifamily market.
She follows municipal land-use decisions closely, as in Livonia’s effort to build a downtown by tearing down its existing city hall, explaining how public-site demolition, zoning decisions and new construction are tied to long-term economic development goals.
She reports on education-linked redevelopment, such as a performing arts charter school planning a move into a long-vacant Detroit property, emphasizing both reuse of idle assets and the programming that will occupy them. Her work on the vacant Herman Kiefer hospital site covers the tension between a private developer and the city over progress, highlighting timelines, investment expectations and accountability around major adaptive-reuse projects.
Across these stories, she reports real estate not just as transactions but as long-term plays in neighborhood change, civic identity and regional growth.
Retail, hospitality and small business expansion
Schanz frequently reports on retail and hospitality businesses as they expand footprints, change ownership or enter new markets.
Her coverage of Sheetz’s proposed location in Royal Oak follows the chain’s steps through local planning processes and what a new site means for traffic, competition and commercial activity around the corridor. She writes on a massive Michigan-based tobacco retailer acquiring an Ohio chain, framing the deal in terms of scale, store counts and cross-state expansion.
Her story on a Corktown brewery leaving Detroit after an acquisition looks at brand consolidation, production decisions and what happens to a neighborhood presence when a facility changes hands.
She profiles consumer-facing entrepreneurs, as in the piece on a “passionate” bridal shop owner bringing a new bridal brand to Michigan, where she explains franchise strategy, customer base and the business case for entering a local market. In services, she has traced how a dry cleaner evolved into a high-demand restoration franchise, unpacking operational shifts, demand drivers and growth plans. These articles show a consistent approach: she ties storefront changes, acquisitions and brand moves back to their operational impacts and local market dynamics.
Nonprofits, philanthropy and capital campaigns
Alongside real estate and business coverage, Schanz reports deeply on nonprofits and philanthropy. She has written about the Music Settlement’s multimillion-dollar capital renovation of its University Circle campus, supported by a major gift from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Supporting Foundation, outlining how the donation translates into facilities upgrades and program expansion.
That focus on capital projects links directly to her broader beat covering health care, biotech and nonprofits for Crain’s Cleveland Business, where organizational strategy and physical infrastructure often intersect. Her reporting on a performing arts charter school relocating to a long-vacant property likewise connects mission-driven education work with investment in buildings and neighborhoods.
Across these nonprofit and philanthropic stories, she emphasizes governance decisions, donor involvement and the tangible outcomes of large gifts or strategic moves, rather than treating them as purely ceremonial announcements.
Cross-market Crain’s reporting experience
Schanz joined Crain’s in May 2024 as a general assignment reporter for Crain’s Detroit Business and Crain’s Grand Rapids Business, before moving into her current Cleveland-focused role. In Detroit and Grand Rapids she covered manufacturing, services, arts and economic development, giving her a broad base in business reporting.
Her work on a family-owned lumber company acquiring a truss manufacturer shows her ability to explain industrial portfolio growth and the operational logic behind acquisitions. Stories about Detroit’s hundreds of murals being leveraged for tourism demonstrate her comfort with cultural assets as economic drivers, connecting public art, visitor experience and city branding. That cross-sector experience informs the way she now handles real estate and nonprofit stories, grounding coverage in deal terms, regulatory steps, stakeholder interests and long-range impacts.
Professional profiles describe her current role as a reporter focused on health care and nonprofits, as well as luxury and lifestyle coverage within Crain’s Cleveland Business, underscoring a beat that sits at the intersection of organizations, capital and place.
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.