Laura Waxmann
Laura Waxmann tracks how capital, companies and city politics are reshaping Bay Area real estate, with particular emphasis on downtown San Francisco’s office and housing landscape. Her reporting appears on Yahoo Finance’s real estate and technology sections as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle’s real estate coverage. She works as a reporter covering the Bay Area business community with a focus on commercial real estate, housing and land use politics.
Leasing surge lifts downtown office market
Waxmann’s recent work centers on large office leases and renewals that define the health of downtown San Francisco’s market.
She has detailed a multi-year lease extension by Amazon at a Market Street tower, noting the scale of the company’s footprint and its role in stabilizing a key downtown asset. She has also covered a local tech company expanding its footprint in the city, framing the story within a broader leasing surge that is lifting the downtown office market.
Her coverage of OpenAI’s expansion in Mission Bay tracks how a single tenant’s growth can reshape an emerging office district, including the company’s sublease of hundreds of thousands of square feet at the former Dropbox headquarters complex. She follows similar patterns across AI and tech firms, reporting on a new AI startup with an “extreme” work culture taking over Cruise’s sublease at a major Brannan Street building. These stories combine deal specifics with tenant strategies, giving a clear view of how high-growth companies are driving demand for large, modern office space.
Waxmann also documents the impact of anchor tenants on the broader downtown corridor, including coverage of leasing activity tied to both established technology brands and younger firms. Her stories consistently quantify square footage, lease terms and building ownership, helping readers understand the scale of each move and its implications for vacancy, pricing and investor appetite in the city’s core business districts.
Exclusive coverage of landmark sales and investments
Beyond leasing, Waxmann focuses on major sales and investment deals that signal turning points for San Francisco landmarks and regional assets. She has chronicled the sale of the Transamerica Pyramid complex to a foreign investor, detailing the total price, per-square-foot valuation and the buyer’s entry into the U.S. real estate market.
The story tracks years of efforts by the previous owners to renovate the tower and attract tenants back to downtown, setting the transaction within a longer arc of repositioning the property.
Her reporting highlights investors eyeing distressed or shuttered properties, including negotiations to purchase a large portion of the closed San Francisco Centre shopping mall. In that piece she isolates the separately owned Bloomingdale’s segment of the complex and identifies the regional investment firm pursuing the acquisition, illustrating how investors dissect complicated ownership structures to find value.
She uses similar detail in covering a climate-focused investment firm’s first California acquisition, a four-building industrial campus in Milpitas purchased for just under $94 million.
Waxmann’s Chronicle bio notes her focus on commercial real estate, housing and land use politics, and her stories reflect that combination by linking big transactions to zoning, redevelopment and the future use of key sites.
For example, she has reported on Golden Gate University vacating its longtime downtown campus and a planned tower that will replace it, connecting institutional exits to dense, vertical redevelopment. Together these pieces show a sustained interest in how landmark properties change hands and evolve, rather than isolated deal coverage.
Real estate finance, lenders and legal fallout
Waxmann regularly covers the financial structures behind Bay Area real estate, especially private lending and the consequences when those structures fail.
She has written on a defunct Novato-based private lending firm whose collapse stranded more than 100 investors and roughly $100 million, detailing criminal charges against its former executives for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. In an earlier story, she tracked the same firm’s bankruptcy filing and ongoing state and federal investigations into apparent losses of tens of millions of dollars of investor funds.
These pieces go beyond surface descriptions of bankruptcy or enforcement actions, drawing out how investor capital was deployed, how it became exposed, and what legal steps follow when real estate lending firms unravel. She treats private lenders as part of the broader ecosystem of Bay Area real estate finance, showing how their practices affect individual investors and the flow of money into local projects. This strand of her work adds a regulatory and legal dimension to her beat that complements her coverage of sales and leases.
Housing, land use politics and downtown recovery
Housing and land use politics are embedded throughout Waxmann’s stories, consistent with her stated focus on these topics. She has covered San Francisco’s downtown recovery efforts, including a downtown recovery group hiring a housing finance expert to guide its next phase, tying governance and expert advice directly to the future of the core business district. Her reporting on Golden Gate University’s departure from downtown and the planned tower replacement similarly connects institutional decisions, land use and housing or mixed-use redevelopment.
Her work also captures public reaction to local housing debates, as seen when a photo she shared from a community meeting sparked widespread pushback from social media users frustrated by the city’s housing market.
That episode illustrates her presence on the ground at civic events and her awareness of how land use decisions and housing policy are contested in public forums. Across these stories, Waxmann treats downtown recovery, redevelopment and housing as interlinked, showing how policy choices, expert hires and civic scrutiny shape the trajectory of San Francisco’s built environment.
Across outlets, Waxmann consistently brings together deal terms, tenant strategies, investor moves and political context, creating a precise, transaction-led view of Bay Area commercial real estate and its intersection with housing and urban policy. Her coverage is distinguished by its focus on specific buildings and dollar amounts, grounded in court filings, public records and market sources, and by its sustained attention to how those details add up to long-term changes in downtown San Francisco and surrounding markets.
4 more real estate journalists.
Aleisha Dawson
Aleisha Dawson covers property where prestige deals, hard market data and lifestyle stories meet, with a particular focus on high-profile apartments and new projects in South East Queensland. She is a regional real estate editor within News Corp’s property network, overseeing property coverage for the Gold Coast Bulletin and contributing to Realestate.com.au’s property news. Her beat spans record-setting penthouse sales, off-market prestige deals, new apartment releases in landmark projects, and one-off high-value homes used as case studies in buyer behaviour. She tracks land and apartment markets with a data-led approach, using specific price points, volume figures and suburb lists. Dawson also reports on quirky homes, celebrity property, pop culture-linked locations and technology-shaped renovations, and her stories are widely republished by developers, agents and project marketers.
Blair Jackson
Blair Jackson explains housing through money: how prices, policy and banks shape the way people buy, sell and live. He is a reporter with the national wire service NewsWire, covering real estate and household finance across Australia. His work follows housing downturns, price movements, negative equity, mortgages, first-home buyers and existing borrowers. He reports on renters, poor housing conditions, high rents, repairs, affordability and housing inequality. He examines zoning, supply targets, tax changes, construction limits, development decisions and efforts to fix housing shortages. His finance coverage includes mortgage fraud, bank risk, interest rates, household costs and windfalls used to pay off property. He also covers auctions, listings, luxury homes, renovations and major developments. Jackson combines data, policy analysis, expert warnings, open-home and auction detail, and personal examples to show how financial decisions affect households and communities.
Bonnie Campbell
Bonnie Campbell is a luxury property reporter for The Australian Financial Review who focuses on the very top of the residential market, where big-ticket homes, mega-mansions and high-profile sales set and test price records. She covers trophy properties, record-breaking deals and prestige streets, using individual sales as case studies in how wealth, status and grand houses move through the market. Her stories track extreme price movements, large-scale renovations, unusual features and multi-million dollar listings, and link them to high-net-worth buyers, business leaders and public figures. She repeatedly returns to prestige coastal, resort and lifestyle markets, explaining how scarcity, views and amenity support multi-million dollar valuations. Alongside single-property features, she produces roundups of major luxury deals to show patterns in where the biggest money flows and which houses define the top end.
Caroline Delaney
Caroline Delaney is a senior property and features journalist at the Irish Examiner whose work links individual homes, damaged houses and outdoor spaces to the wider housing landscape. She covers residential listings with clear, price‑led pieces on specific homes coming to market, highlighting core details such as guide price, size, house type and a plain sense of location. Her property features look at fire damage and repair, treating house fires as a structural issue for the housing market and following cases through court proceedings and the process of putting homes right. She also reports on outdoor spaces and synthetic lawns, including environmental experts’ views on plastic turf in domestic gardens. Her news and features background keeps the tone fact‑led rather than promotional and gives her coverage a practical focus on aspiration, risk and everyday use of housing.