Jeff Kiger
Jeff Kiger follows the money, tenants and projects through Rochester’s business and real estate landscape, using individual deals and openings to show how the local economy is shifting in real time. He is a business reporter and columnist at the Rochester Post Bulletin, where he leads business coverage and writes a regular column focused on new, expanding and closing businesses. His reporting centers on commercial and residential property transactions, development projects and the companies and professionals who shape the market.
Property sales and investment deals
A large share of Kiger’s work documents significant property sales, with clear emphasis on price, buyer, seller and the asset’s role in the community. He has covered investor purchases of apartment complexes, such as the Falcon Landing apartments sale that detailed the latest price and the previous sale figure to show appreciation in a short period. His reporting on investors buying much of the Broadway retail centers for $19.75 million similarly breaks down the transaction, identifies the investment group involved and lists marquee tenants like Total Wine & More and other national retailers.
In coverage of North Rock Real Estate’s $8.98 million acquisition of the Rochester Crossings commercial center, he notes the number of units, anchor tenants such as Chipotle and Panera Bread, and the age of the complex, connecting the investment to its retail mix and history. He also tracks sales of specialized properties, such as the Cottagewood Senior Community, where he reports the $11.73 million price and identifies the acquiring property development firm. Recent work on Fourth Street properties for a new apartment complex fits the same pattern, with detailed purchase prices and the redevelopment intent of the buyer.
Across these pieces, his distinguishing trait is consistent deal-level specificity: corporate entities, sale dates, prior valuations and tenant rosters are standard, making his real estate coverage read like a running ledger of who owns what and for how much.
Real estate professionals and industry change
Kiger regularly profiles the people and firms behind local and national real estate shifts, framing stories around how professionals respond to a changing industry. In his piece on veteran Realtor Pete Dokken moving his team to Real Broker, he explains the move in the context of artificial intelligence and technology transforming traditional real estate, highlighting how a local team is adapting to new brokerage models. His coverage of an AI-focused real estate firm agreeing to buy RE/MAX for $880 million connects global corporate strategy to the residential brokerage world, showing readers how large-scale deals may affect the brands and agents they know.
He also reports on the legal and ethical side of the profession, as in the sentencing of Rochester Realtor Merl Groteboer, where he describes the probation term, fine, and the Realtor’s statement about recommitting to humility, care and integrity.
These stories emphasize named individuals, their teams and their decisions, but they remain grounded in verifiable facts - charges, sentences, transaction values and corporate names - rather than personality-driven profiles. He reinforces this focus on professional accountability and independence with a recurring note that his employer’s opinions do not necessarily reflect his own, a line that appears alongside his real estate coverage and biographical information.
Development projects, retail openings and reuse of space
Beyond straight sales, Kiger devotes substantial attention to how retail, hospitality and office spaces are built, repurposed and activated. His reporting on a new Taco Bell Kitchen X opening in Rochester details the franchisee, square footage, address and connection to Venstar’s broader Creekside development, situating a single restaurant within a long-planned project.
In coverage of Sky Zone transforming the former Herberger’s/Montgomery Ward space at Apache Mall, he describes how a large, empty anchor store is being converted into an active entertainment park, including expected construction timing and opening plans.
He tracks the evolution of office and coworking space through stories about Regus closing its downtown Rochester location and preparing a new site on the former IBM campus, noting prior build-outs, abrupt closures and the specifics of the new address within the technology campus. His “Heard Around Rochester” column stream often carries shorter business-development items, such as a Twin Cities gaming shop, Dreamers Vault, rolling out a Rochester location, signaling smaller but telling shifts in the local retail mix.
Taken together, these pieces show a reporter who treats openings, closings and redevelopments not as isolated announcements but as episodes in the ongoing reuse of commercial real estate - old malls, office buildings and greenfield sites alike.
Business beat breadth and long tenure
While real estate is a core focus, Kiger’s beat spans the broader business ecosystem, including major employers, manufacturing, health care and consumer sectors.
His author biography and professional profile describe him as writing a daily “Heard Around Rochester” column alongside articles on local businesses and large organizations such as Mayo Clinic, IBM, Hormel Foods, Crenlo and others, as well as biotechnology, retail, commercial development, hospitality, housing, banking and media. Those descriptions match the variety visible in his business coverage, where real estate stories sit alongside pieces on coworking firms, restaurant chains, gaming shops and other enterprises tied to the built environment. He has worked as a newspaper journalist since 1992 and has been at the Rochester Post Bulletin since 1999, giving him decades of continuity on the business beat.
His professional profile notes that he is in charge of business coverage, writes a weekly business column that flags coming, expanding and closing businesses before press releases go out, and tracks sectors from biotechnology to commercial real estate development. His X bio reinforces that role in a compressed form, calling himself a business columnist and reporter and repeating his distinction between his opinions and those of his employer.
Across platforms, the same focus emerges: long-term, numbers-driven reporting on business and property changes, delivered through both transactional stories and a standing column that surfaces deals and developments early.
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.