Mark Hallum
Mark Hallum covers leasing, sales and capital shifts across commercial properties, with a consistent focus on how individual deals reshape New York City’s office, retail and mixed-use landscape. He brings a broader news background to this work, having previously covered transportation, politics and crime on the local level.
Leasing Deals Across New York City Submarkets
Hallum’s core coverage tracks office, retail, hospitality and specialty leases across Manhattan and the outer boroughs, with particular attention to square footage, building positioning and tenant mix.
His reporting on office transactions includes midtown towers such as 575 Madison Avenue, 1212 Avenue of the Americas and 1345 Avenue of the Americas, where he details new leases by banks, investment firms and global financial services companies and situates them within specific corridors like Midtown. He covers tenant movements in landmark locations as well, including deals like Landmark Management’s 12,000-square-foot lease at One Grand Central Place, showing how individual occupiers anchor and expand their presence in transit-rich office hubs. His beat extends to sublease activity, documenting transactions such as Adaptive Security taking over BarkBox’s 51,220-square-foot office at 120 Broadway and tracking that tenant’s rapid growth in space over three years. In neighborhood markets like the West Village, he reports restaurant and cannabis shop leases alongside multifamily and mixed-use transactions, illustrating how small-format retail and hospitality tenants participate in broader investment stories.
Coverage in Queens and the Bronx highlights credit unions, moving companies, schools and health-care users signing leases and subleases, with Hallum emphasizing the operational needs behind these occupancies and the size and location of the space they take. On the Upper East Side, he follows fitness studios, grocery concepts and high-fashion retail condos, pairing tenant announcements with pricing, foreclosure details and the role of prominent owners.
Investments, Development and Distress
Beyond pure leasing, Hallum regularly covers investment sales and development plans, tracking how assets change hands and how new projects come to market. His work includes stories on apartment portfolios sold for tens of millions of dollars, single-building trades on streets like Cornelia in the West Village, and industrial and warehouse disposals in Long Island City, always noting buyer and seller, price and the intended future use of the property. He reports on planned residential projects such as a 402-unit housing development along the Astoria waterfront and new cooperative units in the Bronx, connecting land deals to zoning, policy and housing supply as those projects move through filings and approvals.
Distress is part of his beat: Hallum covers foreclosures on grocery-anchored retail condominiums on the Upper East Side and examines how bankruptcy events, such as department store restructurings, affect store closures and spare major metropolitan markets from the worst impacts. Nationally, he follows situations where institutional brokers are tapped to market properties once slated for detention centers, framing those assignments as part of a reshuffling of politically sensitive real estate into new uses. Across these pieces, he treats price, capital structure and regulatory context as central facts rather than background, giving a clear view of who is committing money, how, and where risk is emerging.
National Economy, Retail Metrics and Emerging Technologies
Hallum also writes on national economic and capital markets themes, tying macro events and data releases directly to commercial real estate performance. His coverage of tariffs and legal challenges by state attorneys general situates construction and trade policy within the cost structures of builders and the outlook for development pipelines. In pieces on war, market volatility and investor reactions, he tracks how quickly financial markets correct and what that means for financing and deal volume in the property sector.
He reports on labor data and jobs numbers, highlighting the contribution of construction gains to surprisingly strong job reports and comparing current figures to prior benchmarks such as mid-2025 levels. Retail absorption and bankruptcy coverage are treated quantitatively, with Hallum citing high national retail absorption in specific quarters and mapping which regions are most exposed or insulated when major chains close stores.
His interest in innovation appears in work such as an AI innovation forum, where he examines how artificial intelligence and crypto are still in early stages within commercial real estate and what industry leaders expect from these technologies. In parallel, his reporting on AI-powered and tech-focused tenants taking space in New York City, such as Adaptive Security’s series of office expansions, shows how emerging sectors translate abstract technology themes into concrete occupancy decisions.
Executive Moves and Industry Leadership
Hallum frequently covers executive appointments and promotions, treating people moves as a key lens on strategy within major owners, investors and service firms. His reporting includes leadership changes at global real estate companies, such as promotions to co-chief executive roles, where he sets out how new leadership structures align with growth plans and portfolio management.
He tracks hiring waves at investment managers, including firms adding former institutional asset managers and creating new investment solutions teams, and notes how these personnel changes support expansion in specific product lines or markets. In stories on operational executives at large retail and mixed-use owners, he presents promotions and role changes alongside organizational responsibilities, giving a clear sense of who runs what within complex platforms.
Across these pieces, he maintains the same deal-focused clarity found in his leasing and investment coverage, emphasizing title, remit and corporate context without shifting into personality profiles.
Taken together, Hallum’s work combines granular deal reporting across New York City’s submarkets with national economic analysis and close attention to who is in charge of deploying capital and managing assets. His prior experience covering transportation, politics and crime supports his ability to write about policy, legal actions and public-sector dynamics when they intersect with commercial real estate.
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.