Taylor Herzlich

Taylor Herzlich is a reporter at the New York Post who covers real estate and the housing economy, connecting property policy, market moves and the cost of living for both landlords and everyday homeowners. Her coverage tracks how rent controls, tax proposals, interest-rate shifts and institutional investment decisions reshape the housing landscape in New York City and across the US. Alongside housing, she reports on energy prices, global capital flows and the impact of AI on the media business, giving her beat a broader economic and technology frame.

Real estate policy and the housing market

Herzlich focuses on how policy decisions reverberate through property values and investor behavior. She reported on Google co-founder Sergey Brin unloading his stake in a New York City multifamily fund at six cents on the dollar as landlords contend with rent freezes, strict rent controls and rising costs, showing how political pressure can drive even deep-pocketed investors out of the market. She covers proposals such as a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes worth more than $5 million, detailing experts’ concerns about mismatches between assessed and market values and the likelihood of legal fights over how those levies are calculated.

At the national level, she writes on plans to bar large institutional buyers from scooping up single-family homes, framing them as attempts to cool investor-driven demand and open more inventory to individual buyers. Herzlich regularly uses data on mortgage rates and foreclosure filings to show how macro policy and bond-buying programs filter down to homeowners. She has covered mortgage rates falling below 6% for the first time in years after a $200 billion purchase of mortgage bonds, explaining how shifts in borrowing costs change affordability for households. In another piece she highlighted that US home foreclosures had risen for the 12th straight month, affecting nearly 40,000 properties, drawing on analytics from ATTOM to map the states and metros with the highest foreclosure rates.

Cost of living and household finances

Herzlich extends her housing coverage into the broader cost-of-living pressures families face. She has reported that raising a child in the US now costs more than $300,000 over 18 years, nearly a 30% increase in just three years, using LendingTree analysis to break down annual spending on rent, food, transport, insurance and especially day care. She calls out how infant day care can average over $17,000 per year nationally and climb above $20,000 in high-cost states such as New York and California, connecting child-care bills with the realities of local housing markets.

Herzlich also tracks everyday fuel costs, covering how US gasoline prices sank for six consecutive weeks and fell 14% from a May peak amid developments in US–Iran talks, underscoring how geopolitics feeds into family budgets. Taken together, these consumer-focused stories show her interest in how housing, energy and family expenses combine into a single affordability picture for American households.

Markets, energy and global investment

Beyond household finances, Herzlich reports on capital flows and commodities that shape the broader economic climate around real estate and business. She wrote on federal regulators probing suspiciously well-timed oil trades worth more than $800 million made just before major Iran war news, explaining the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s focus on potential insider leaks and the trading activity of firms from a London investment shop to a real estate finance fund and a French oil major. In another story she detailed a sharp rebound in foreign direct investment into the US, citing Bureau of Economic Analysis figures showing international investors spending $232.2 billion in a single year, mostly on acquiring American businesses, after four years of declines.

She breaks down which sectors and regions attract this money, noting large flows into manufacturing and publishing and significant commitments from Japanese, German and Canadian firms, as well as heavy investment into states such as California, Texas and Pennsylvania. This market-facing work complements her housing coverage by tracing how global capital, energy prices and trade tensions set the backdrop for investment decisions in property and other assets.

AI, media and information platforms

Herzlich maintains a distinct strand of coverage on AI and the media industry, focusing on accuracy, bias and editorial accountability. She reported on plans by Business Insider to start publishing stories under an AI byline, explaining how generative tools would be used to draft news articles that human editors would then review for precision and fairness, and noting similar AI-written bullet-point summaries at Bloomberg. In a follow-up line of reporting, she covered Wired and Business Insider deleting phony articles allegedly written under the alias “Margaux Blanchard” after claims the pieces were AI-generated and riddled with errors, highlighting the reputational stakes when publishers experiment with automation.

Herzlich has also chronicled Elon Musk’s launch of Grokipedia, an AI-powered encyclopedia designed to compete with Wikipedia, describing its interface, hundreds of thousands of entries and Musk’s promise of less ideological bias in how information is presented. On the broadcast side, she writes about how television news handles political conflict and extremism, including pieces on MSNBC hosts pressing a Democratic senator to denounce a New York City democratic socialist and on CNN deleting a post that had downplayed suspected terrorists hurling homemade bombs near Gracie Mansion. Across these stories, Herzlich connects technology and editorial choices back to questions of trust, bias and the reliability of the information ecosystem that investors, homeowners and voters rely on.