Jonathan LaMantia
Jonathan LaMantia reports on how Long Island’s housing market works in practice, with a focus on the pressures, policies and disputes that shape where and how people live. His coverage tracks both residential real estate and broader business issues tied to property ownership, development and affordability.
Residential market pressures and affordability
LaMantia’s work consistently explains why buying or keeping a home on Long Island is so difficult, grounding big-picture trends in specific data and individual cases. In one widely cited analysis, he examines why Long Island homebuyers cannot catch a break in a market where prices and competition remain elevated, a piece recognized by a national real estate journalism association for its reporting and interviews. He also explores how homes in some of Long Island’s most competitive markets typically sell above asking price, drawing on home sales data and market analysis to show which communities are hottest and why.
Affordability is a recurring theme. He reports on tools that help identify prime areas for affordable housing on Long Island, explaining how mapping and planning can steer new development toward locations that make sense for both residents and municipalities. Across these stories, he links individual buyers and sellers to structural forces such as inventory constraints, pricing trends and local land-use decisions, making the economics of homeownership clear for a general audience.
Legal and regulatory disputes around property
LaMantia often covers the legal side of real estate, showing how court rulings, foreclosure actions and regulatory decisions affect homeowners and developers. In his report on a Long Island homeowner who beat foreclosure after a 16-year legal fight, he follows a long-running case through the courts and explains what the outcome means for both the borrower and lenders pursuing similar actions. That story reflects a broader interest in how mortgage enforcement, loan practices and consumer protections play out in real life.
His bylines also appear on pieces that detail financial relationships between local officials and developers, including coverage of a town councilman’s multimillion-dollar loan to a developer in an area targeted for growth. In these articles, he connects money flows, development proposals and political decision-making, showing how they intersect with zoning, project approvals and public trust.
Development, planning and business impacts
Beyond individual transactions, LaMantia writes about how development and business decisions reshape Long Island’s commercial and residential landscape.
His coverage includes the business side of residential real estate, such as how builders, investors and large property owners respond to demand in different parts of the region. He has reported on new tools and strategies used by planners and housing advocates to steer development, including data-driven approaches to identifying suitable sites for affordable housing and understanding neighborhood-level change.
In these stories, he treats real estate as a business beat, looking at returns, risk and market positioning alongside community impact.
He pays attention to how local economic organizations and business groups view the housing market, reflecting their concerns about workforce housing, commercial vitality and long-term growth. The reporting often combines interviews with stakeholders, analysis of public records and market data to show how decisions made by developers and officials filter down to ordinary residents.
Role on the real estate beat
At the masthead, LaMantia is identified as a business reporter focused on real estate, with a remit that centers on Long Island’s housing market and related business news. His work regularly returns to three core questions: how much homes cost, who can afford them, and how policy and politics influence both.
He covers residential sales trends, competitive markets, foreclosure and finance disputes, and efforts to expand affordable housing, maintaining a consistent focus on the intersection of property, money and local decision-making.
For story planning, he is a fit for topics that involve housing affordability, competitive suburban markets, local development battles, and the financial and regulatory mechanics behind buying, selling or keeping property. His reporting style blends clear explanations of complex issues with grounded examples from specific Long Island communities.
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.