Valentina Palm
Valentina Palm is a reporter for The Palm Beach Post who covers Wellington, Royal Palm Beach and the western communities of Palm Beach County, with a focus on how growth, real estate development and public policy decisions reshape everyday life there. Her recent work spans waterfront luxury condo projects, proposals to remake downtown riverfront property and stories on how the housing crisis and immigration enforcement affect local families, giving her beat a community-first lens on real estate and development.
Growth, redevelopment and waterfront real estate
Palm’s real estate coverage often tracks high-end and high-impact projects, tying them to the changing character of West Palm Beach and nearby communities.
She has reported on Alba luxury condominiums as the first stop on a West Palm “billionaire’s corridor,” zeroing in on how a single waterfront tower fits into a broader push to attract ultra-wealthy buyers along the city’s shoreline. In related work, she has helped cover plans for a waterfront park that could take over the site of E.R.
Bradley’s, a longstanding bar and restaurant on the West Palm Beach waterfront, outlining how redevelopment would reshape public access and a familiar piece of the local skyline.
Because her core beat includes fast-growing communities such as Wellington, Royal Palm Beach, Loxahatchee, Greenacres and Palm Springs, these skyline stories sit alongside day-to-day development questions further inland. Across these pieces, she distinguishes herself from a generic real estate reporter by treating major projects not just as market deals but as choices about land, public space and neighborhood identity that matter to residents who live nearby.
Housing costs and pressures on working communities
Beyond luxury projects, Palm regularly reports on the cost side of the housing story, especially for working families and Hispanic residents in Palm Beach County. In coverage of Palm Beach County’s housing crisis, she has focused on how rising rents and home prices disproportionately affect Hispanic communities, highlighting the gap between wage levels and housing costs and the tradeoffs families make to stay in their neighborhoods.
She brings a similar lens to stories that, at first glance, sit outside traditional housing coverage. In her reporting on Delmar Farm, an animal sanctuary in Loxahatchee facing possible closure because of high costs of animal care, she shows how escalating expenses can threaten community spaces that rely on land, facilities and long-term stewardship.
By pairing these kinds of stories with her work on development and waterfront projects, Palm’s beat connects the economics of housing and land use with the viability of local institutions, rather than treating real estate as a standalone business topic.
Immigration, citizenship and community voices
Immigration and citizenship are recurring threads in Palm’s reporting, especially where federal policy and local enforcement intersect with housing and community stability. She has covered the case of Olga Perez of Lake Worth Beach, one of Florida’s few Mayan translators, who faces deportation and would leave behind her four U.S.-citizen children and a community that depends on her language skills. In that story, she documents both the personal stakes and the practical consequences for courts, schools and services that rely on culturally specific translation, showing how one immigration case reverberates across a county.
Palm also co-reported a feature on “What citizenship means: New Americans tell their stories,” collecting first-person accounts from people who recently became citizens and exploring what that status change means in their daily lives. Around that project, The Palm Beach Post has invited new citizens to share their experiences directly with Palm and her colleagues, underscoring her role in building longer-form narrative coverage of immigration and civic belonging. These pieces distinguish her from a typical real estate or metro reporter by making immigration status, language access and the path to citizenship central elements of the local story, not side notes.
Western Palm Beach County civic life
Palm’s beat includes the civic and institutional fabric of western Palm Beach County, from churches and dioceses to local governments and community organizations. She has reported from the installation of Manuel de Jesus Rodriguez as the new bishop of the Diocese of Palm, documenting a leadership change in a major religious institution and its significance for the congregations it serves.
Within her regular coverage of Wellington, Royal Palm Beach, Loxahatchee, Greenacres, Palm Springs and other western communities, she tracks how decisions by civic and faith leaders intersect with growth, housing and demographic change.
Taken together, Palm’s work is defined by its focus on how development, housing costs and immigration policy play out in specific neighborhoods and among specific communities. Whether the subject is a waterfront luxury condo tower, a proposed downtown park, a housing crisis in Hispanic neighborhoods or the deportation of a key community translator, she consistently grounds the story in the people and institutions who will live with the consequences.
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.