Mike Platania
Mike Platania reports on commercial real estate and development for Richmond BizSense, with a focus on the deals and adaptive reuse projects reshaping local business districts. His stories track how specific properties, tenants and developers turn individual transactions into larger mixed-use and redevelopment plays, making real estate moves legible to a business audience. He returns to key sites as they evolve, following projects from first anchor tenants through subsequent phases and conversions.
Adaptive reuse and mixed-use projects
Adaptive reuse is a central thread in Platania’s coverage.
In his reporting on the $1.2 million sale of a longtime Church Hill auto shop, he shows how a single deal can unlock plans to convert a legacy commercial site into a mixed-use project, detailing both the building’s past life and its future blend of uses. He applies the same lens to plans to convert a warehouse near Rocketts Landing into mixed-use, explaining how underused industrial space is being repositioned within a broader waterfront corridor strategy.
Across these stories he consistently links sale prices, proposed uses and neighborhood context, making it clear why a given property is attractive for conversion and how it fits into surrounding retail, residential and office stock.
His reporting on expansions around the Whole Foods- and CarMax-anchored Sauer Center shows how he treats multi-phase mixed-use work as a continuing narrative.
He traces the success of early anchor tenants and then follows later phases that add new space and uses, highlighting how each step changes the commercial landscape around the site. In these pieces, Platania balances project details - square footage, uses, new buildings - with practical markers like traffic draws and tenant mix, so readers can see both the physical and business logic of the redevelopment.
Developers, investors and deal structure
Platania’s stories tend to foreground the people and firms driving local real estate activity. When a busy developer makes “a big play” near the Sauer Center, he identifies the buyer, the seller and the strategic significance of the $7.9 million acquisition, not just the headline number.
In coverage of deals like the Church Hill auto shop sale, he ties price and timing to the redevelopment plan, showing how investors structure their moves to unlock new mixed-use potential. His work highlights recurring players such as Spy Rock Real Estate Group and Sauer Properties, giving readers a clear sense of who is active, where they are placing bets and how their portfolios connect across projects.
He pays close attention to transaction mechanics - sale amounts, prior ownership, zoning or program changes - while keeping the focus on business impact. By consistently noting what a property has been, what it will become and who is behind the change, Platania provides a practical map of local deal flow.
This emphasis on developers and investors makes his coverage useful for anyone tracking competitive dynamics in the commercial real estate market, from landlords and brokers to tenants looking at emerging corridors.
Business reporting across formats
In addition to his print and online work for Richmond BizSense, Platania regularly brings his real estate reporting into audio format through a recurring news segment that highlights top business and development stories. On these segments he distills complex projects - such as the warehouse conversion near Rocketts Landing or major acquisitions around the Sauer Center - into concise updates that still carry key details about players, investment levels and timelines. The cross-format presence reinforces the same beat priorities: commercial projects, mixed-use redevelopment, and significant property transactions.
Across platforms, his style is direct and fact-driven. He leans on concrete figures, named firms and specific sites rather than broad commentary, and he tracks projects over time so listeners and readers can follow how one phase leads to the next. That combination of property-level detail, consistent attention to the main developers involved, and clear explanations of how each move changes a corridor or neighborhood is what distinguishes Platania’s coverage from more generic real estate reporting.
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.