Jonathan LaMantia
Jonathan LaMantia is a business reporter at Newsday who covers residential real estate and the broader housing economy on Long Island, with a consistent focus on how prices, policy and industry decisions affect everyday residents. His coverage combines granular analysis of home prices, rents and mortgage costs with reporting on affordability gaps, discrimination cases and structural barriers to new housing. He brings a background in covering the business of health care to his real estate beat, which informs his attention to data, regulation and the financial stakes for both consumers and companies.
Residential prices, bidding wars and mortgage costs
LaMantia closely tracks the trajectory of Long Island home prices, including explanatory work on why homes in the region have become so expensive and how that affects buyers and sellers. He reports on where bidding wars are most intense, using neighborhood-level sales data to show where homes routinely sell above asking price and how widespread that phenomenon has become.
His coverage of mortgage rates ties national financial trends to local impacts, documenting jumps in average 30-year rates and the way those shifts delay plans for aspiring buyers. In pieces on record-setting sale prices and changing market heat, he moves between individual properties and aggregate statistics to give a clear picture of the residential market’s direction.
He frequently anchors these stories in specific deals, list-price dynamics and buyer behavior, keeping the focus on what the numbers mean for people trying to buy or sell a home.
Affordability, cost burdens and housing inequality
A defining element of LaMantia’s beat is the link he draws between the real estate market and household financial strain. He has reported that Long Island renters face the highest housing cost burden in New York state, quantifying how much income tenants devote to rent and comparing the region’s burden to that of New York City and elsewhere. His work on Black homeownership examines the gap between Black and white households, pairing data on ownership rates with profiles of residents who are navigating the path from renting to owning. In coverage of a Coldwell Banker settlement over housing discrimination, he connects legal outcomes and regulatory enforcement to the lived experience of buyers who encounter unequal treatment.
Across these pieces, he relies on statistics, state and local reports, and expert voices to show how affordability challenges intersect with race, income and geography. He consistently grounds broader themes of inequality in specific stories about families, tenants and first-time buyers, keeping abstract issues tied to concrete examples.
Real estate industry, regulation and development
Beyond consumer-facing stories, LaMantia reports on the institutions and rules that shape Long Island’s housing market. He covers the real estate industry’s infrastructure, including the expansion of OneKey MLS through an acquisition of a Mid-Hudson multiple listing service, explaining how such moves affect brokers, data-sharing and regional market coverage.
His reporting on zoning and development highlights tools such as a zoning atlas that industry panelists and developers see as a way to identify potential sites for new housing and address the region’s shortage. He has detailed regulatory actions such as a settlement requiring a title insurance company to pay New York State after a data breach, laying out the compliance and consumer-protection implications for real estate transactions. Coverage of affordable housing initiatives, including a Port Jefferson rental building selecting tenants through a lottery, shows how public policy, financing and local planning come together to create new units.
In these stories, he treats real estate as a business system, tracing how decisions by firms, regulators and local governments shape what eventually appears in listings and leases.
Luxury sales and the Hamptons market
LaMantia also reports on the top end of the market, including the most expensive Hamptons home sales.
He has chronicled landmark deals such as the sale of a Southampton oceanfront estate for more than $100 million, describing the property’s features and positioning the transaction within the hierarchy of Long Island’s priciest sales. These pieces connect the ultra-luxury segment to broader trends, noting how high-end activity influences perceptions of the market and interacts with overall price levels. By covering both bidding wars on typical homes and nine-figure estate sales, he shows the full spectrum of Long Island real estate, from everyday transactions to marquee deals.
Business reporting approach to housing
Across beats, LaMantia’s work reflects a business reporter’s approach to complex systems.
His biography notes that he covers residential real estate and other business news on Long Island, and that he previously covered the business of health care for a New York business publication. That background shows in his consistent use of data, his attention to regulatory and financial details, and his interest in how industry structures translate into costs and opportunities for residents. Whether he is explaining a surge in home prices, a settlement over discrimination, or a new development tool for builders, his stories are designed to make the mechanics of the housing market intelligible to non-specialists while preserving nuance in the underlying economics.
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Addie Morfoot
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Alcynna Lloyd
Alcynna Lloyd is a real estate reporter and economic journalist at Business Insider whose work is distinct for treating housing as a core economic system people must navigate. She covers how housing markets, costs, and mobility shape everyday life decisions, connecting data on rents, home prices, and city trends with stories of people managing debt, multigenerational living, and moves abroad. Her beat centers on housing costs, renters, and household strategies, following renters pushing back against landlords and tracking “desperate home sellers” using concessions in unaffordable markets. A second strand of her coverage focuses on relocation, remote work, and cheap cities as everyday economic strategies. She regularly uses rankings and lists, such as best and worst states to buy a home and Rising Stars of Real Estate, and reads city housing and migration shifts as signs of broader economic change.
Alec Lazenby
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Amir Ali
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