Julian Nazar
Julian Nazar covers how commercial real estate deals, tenant decisions and development projects reshape New York City’s neighborhoods. He is a real estate reporter at Crain's New York Business, focusing on office, retail and mixed-use properties across the five boroughs. His work stands out for its attention to specific corridors such as Gowanus and Boerum Hill, close tracking of individual transactions, and a consistent interest in how landlords, tenants and developers translate market momentum into changes on the ground.
Developer scoops up Gowanus site for $19M
In his first enterprise story for Crain's, Nazar reported on a developer acquiring a site in Gowanus for $19 million, using the deal to explore how investment is reshaping that former industrial neighborhood. For that piece he describes speaking with the developer, a broker and an attorney and supplementing interviews with city records, showing a reporting style that combines stakeholder perspectives with primary documents.
He has also written about developers such as Brian Ezra and other firms leading ground-up residential and mixed-use projects in Gowanus, extending his coverage beyond single transactions into the broader development wave in the area. A separate story on a new 99‑unit building in Boerum Hill, framed as part of a wider surge in 99‑unit projects across the city, underscores his focus on how individual projects fit into larger patterns in the residential pipeline.
Three Japanese restaurants to open at Bank of America tower
Nazar’s real estate coverage regularly follows how food-and-beverage and retail tenants activate prominent office towers and influence the character of business districts. In his piece on three Japanese restaurants opening at The Durst Organization’s Bank of America tower at One Bryant Park, he details a multi-concept dining destination being built inside the skyscraper and connects it to the landlord’s strategy for the property. Earlier, he covered Clune Construction’s relocation of its New York headquarters to 655 Third Avenue near Grand Central, reporting on the firm’s lease for an entire floor and situating the move within the Midtown office market.
His prior beat covering retail, office and cannabis news for a New York business journal gives him a broad view of tenant types and asset classes, which comes through in his Crain’s stories on both traditional office users and newer, experience-driven concepts.
Paramount Group falls off of largest property managers list
Nazar also works with rankings and industry lists to explain structural shifts in the market. In a story pegged to Crain’s “Largest Commercial Property Managers in New York City” list, he reported that Paramount Group was no longer among the city’s biggest property managers, using the list as the basis for a news piece on the firm’s position in the market. This kind of coverage shows him tracking not only individual properties and leases but also changes in who controls significant slices of the city’s commercial inventory.
The use of league tables and annual lists complements his deal reporting, giving readers both transaction-level detail and a sense of the broader hierarchy among major owners and managers.
Brooklyn’s investment sales market is off to a strong start
His reporting on Brooklyn’s investment sales market illustrates a comfort with data and broker research as source material. In coverage of a first-quarter market report, Nazar highlighted that Brooklyn recorded around $2.2 billion in dollar volume across more than 300 commercial transactions, turning those figures into a narrative about momentum in the borough’s investment sales. The story links granular transaction counts with neighborhood-level trends, aligning with his broader interest in emerging areas and the flow of capital into them.
That data-driven approach builds on his experience covering commercial real estate and local news, where he has routinely translated complex reports and public records into concise stories about how the city’s built environment is changing.
Before joining Crain's New York Business, Nazar covered retail, office and cannabis news in New York City for a business journal, preceded by work on local news at a community newspaper, experience that informs his block-level reporting and attention to neighborhood context. Across his beats, he has consistently focused on the interaction between landlords, tenants and communities, whether through headquarters relocations, new restaurant concepts in office towers or the evolution of property managers’ portfolios.
At Crain’s he carries that perspective into a real estate beat defined by specific deals, clear numbers and the cumulative impact of those stories on the shape of New York’s commercial districts.
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.