Julianne Cuba
Julianne Cuba reports on the forces reshaping New York’s property landscape for Crain’s New York Business, tying individual deals to their impact on community institutions and future housing. She focuses on the intersection of sales, redevelopment plans and financial stress in the market, rather than treating transactions as isolated numbers.
Community properties and redevelopment
Cuba’s real estate coverage often starts with properties that anchor a neighborhood and follows them through sale and potential redevelopment. Her work includes reporting on the sale of a shuttered Queens White Castle site for $15 million and its positioning for a future housing project, highlighting how even small-footprint commercial properties become entry points for new residential development. She has also covered the sale of a longtime Park Slope early childhood center building for nearly $13 million by an education-focused nonprofit to a private ownership entity, detailing both the price and the building’s role in early-childhood services before the deal.
In stories like these she tracks who is buying, who is selling and how land use could change, paying particular attention to the transition from community or commercial uses into new forms of housing. Her reporting combines deal terms with context about the institutions involved, making clear what a transaction means for the surrounding neighborhood.
Distressed offices and lender relationships
Beyond straightforward sales, Cuba follows distress in the office market and the role of lenders when properties no longer support their debt.
Her coverage includes a Madison Avenue office tower that returned to its lender, framing the event as part of a broader shift in how underperforming buildings are handled rather than a one-off foreclosure. In this work she focuses on ownership changes driven by financial pressure, the mechanics of properties going back to lenders and the implications for tenants and investors. She often connects these stories to questions of valuation, vacancy and future repositioning of the buildings, showing how financial distress can trigger a new chapter for high-profile commercial assets.
Feature profiles and Gotham Gigs
While her primary beat is real estate, Cuba also contributes feature-format coverage that looks at the people working inside New York’s business landscape. She writes in the Gotham Gigs series, profiling individual professionals and their roles, which adds a human-angle complement to her property and finance reporting. In these pieces she shifts from transaction data to narrative detail, capturing career paths, day-to-day responsibilities and how individuals fit into the city’s economic fabric. The combination of Gotham Gigs features and deal-focused real estate stories gives her portfolio range across both asset-level and person-level coverage.
Beat background and reporting approach
Cuba holds the role of real estate reporter at Crain’s New York Business, focusing on the city’s commercial and residential property markets. Her professional background includes prior experience covering city issues such as transportation and neighborhood news at other New York publications, which informs her attention to how real estate decisions affect everyday life and urban policy.
Across her work she reports in a straightforward news format, grounding stories in hard numbers like sale prices and building size, then layering in history, institutional missions and potential future uses. She consistently shows who gains or loses control of a property, what kind of capital is behind the transaction and how those changes may alter the character of a corridor or block.
The result is coverage that links the technical side of real estate deals to the practical realities of housing, education spaces and workplaces in New York.
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.