Heidi Groover
Heidi Groover treats real estate as a public-interest beat, focusing on how Washington’s housing market, rental costs, and land-use decisions shape daily life for residents and neighborhoods. She is a real estate reporter at The Seattle Times, covering housing and real estate with an emphasis on affordability, tenant protections, commercial development, and policy. Her reporting blends market data, legal and policy detail, and ground-level impacts, making complex housing issues understandable for people who live and work in the region.
Housing costs and market trends
Groover’s core coverage tracks Washington’s housing market, explaining how prices, sales, and mortgage rates move across the region. In recent work on Seattle-area home prices “defying gravity” even as demand wanes, she uses sales and pricing data to show that limited inventory and high mortgage rates are keeping prices elevated despite fewer buyers.
When King County’s median single-family home price topped $1 million, she broke down how that record high fits into year-over-year price growth and mortgage rates hovering around 7%, and what that means for would-be buyers who are still on the sidelines.
Her stories often translate technical market trends into plain terms, highlighting the gap between what homes cost and what local incomes can support.
In coverage of how much Seattle-area renters would need to pay to move from renting to owning, she uses affordability calculations to show that many households must devote more than double their current housing costs to buy a home, underscoring how far out of reach ownership has become. Across these pieces, she returns to a central theme: rising prices are not just numbers, but pressures that shape who can stay in the region and who is pushed out.
Renters, evictions, and rental policy
Alongside sales and prices, Groover consistently reports on rental costs, tenant protections, and eviction policy. Her coverage of a new statewide cap on rent increases explains how a law limiting rent hikes to 7% plus inflation, up to a maximum of 10%, translates into a specific percentage for the coming year based on recent inflation data. She lays out the mechanics of the cap, what types of rentals are covered, and how the Department of Commerce sets the exact limit, giving renters clear information about what they can expect and what landlords are allowed to do.
Groover’s beat includes evictions and the rules that govern them, situating individual landlord-tenant disputes within broader policy debates about housing security. Her rental coverage frequently connects legal changes with practical impacts, showing how shifts in rent regulation or tenant protections affect households already strained by high costs.
The through-line is service-oriented: she writes for people navigating the system, not just for industry insiders, and uses straightforward explanations rather than jargon when covering complex statutes or regulations.
Land use, commercial real estate, and new housing models
Groover also covers commercial real estate and land-use policy, focusing on how major projects and zoning decisions reshape urban space. In reporting on a proposal for a downtown data center, she looks at the potential repurposing of core city blocks and what that kind of development could mean for the surrounding business district and future jobs. Her commercial real estate stories examine not only deals and tenants but also how those projects fit into the broader trajectory of downtown recovery and change.
Her interest in land use extends to new housing models and public-sector experiments in affordability.
In a story on Seattle’s first social housing building, she reports that more than 10,000 people applied to live there and explains how the city is testing a model designed to fill the gap between traditional subsidized housing and a market that has left many middle-income residents without options. Groover connects these initiatives to long-running debates over how to fund housing, who benefits from public investment, and whether new models can address displacement rather than deepen it. Across development and land-use coverage, she foregrounds the trade-offs between growth, preservation, and affordability.
Public-facing housing explainer and long-running focus
Beyond the news pages, Groover is regularly invited to discuss housing and real estate in public forums, reflecting her role as an explainer of the region’s affordability challenges. She has appeared at membership events and community gatherings to talk through housing affordability, outlining the scale of the problem and the kinds of policy and market changes that would be required to address it.
In these settings she keeps the same approach as in her reporting: plain language, attention to both numbers and human impacts, and a focus on structural forces that drive outcomes.
Groover’s X profile underscores that she covers housing and real estate for The Seattle Times and signals an ongoing interest in how funding mechanisms and development choices can either support affordable housing or contribute to displacement. Before joining the masthead, she reported extensively on housing and local politics at another local news outlet, building a long-running focus on how policy decisions filter down to individual residents and neighborhoods.
Taken together, her work is distinguished by treating real estate reporting as a lens on inequality, community change, and the rules that govern who gets to live where, rather than solely as a market or lifestyle beat.
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.