2024 President’s Notebook
By Aldo Svaldi
Denver Post
Count me as an accidental real estate reporter. My dream job was to work as a foreign correspondent and I was lucky enough to land an internship in Saudi Arabia covering the first Persian Gulf War out of journalism school. After coming home, the only job I could find was at a business journal, not what I had planned on. I covered natural resources, then finance and economics before joining a dot-com site affiliated with Financial Times Energy and covering utilities. The catered lunches, nap rooms and ping pong tables were too good to last.
By late 2000 I was at The Denver Post, covering finance again. Real estate still wasn’t my thing. But something wasn’t right in the Denver housing market. California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida were all booming, but metro Denver was leading the nation in foreclosures. Many of those defaulting were first-time buyers holding strange mortgages that were anything but conventional. Our editor thought it would be good to team an investigative reporter with a finance reporter. We zeroed in on street called Mocking Bird Lane, full of first-time new home buyers lured by the dream of ownership. It proved a financial trap for many of them. Our coverage was a finalist for the Morton Margolin Prize, but a feature about a Maryland crab shack beat us out. We knew we were onto something, but neither we nor the judges knew how big it was about to become.
I kept covering residential real estate through the crash. But I didn’t know about NAREE until a former colleague, Kris Hudson, urged me to attend a conference he was organizing in 2012 in Denver. Kris was a talented telecom reporter at The Post, who switched over to covering retail real estate after joining The Wall Street Journal in Dallas. He remains a NAREE fixture, the tall guy running around with a camera at the conferences. The quality of the speakers and sessions, not to mention my editor, had me running back to the newsroom to file stories, causing me to miss out on the really fun stuff, the social mixers and tours. About three years later, The Post entered some stories in the NAREE contest about the legalization of marijuana and its impact on real estate. Someone had to go to Miami to represent the paper, so I made the sacrifice.
At the end of that conference, I found myself on a boat heading to tour some properties and met chairman Jason Hidalgo for the first time. Somewhere between Miami and South Beach, out on the open water, I knew I would be coming back – Denver again, Austin, Miami again, Atlanta, Las Vegas.
There are only two business reporters left at The Post out of a department that once had 18 people. We are generalists by default, but specialists in real estate by necessity. Real estate stories generate more online traffic than any other business beat. Real estate is business news in crystalline form. If an AI system ever takes over our business coverage, I am pretty sure it would be writing mostly real estate stories.
Whether you specialize in real estate, or like me, you are juggling several business beats, consider joining NAREE if you haven’t. And while you are at it, consider entering NAREE’s journalism contest, now in its 74th year. The entry window for content produced in 2023 runs from Feb. 1 to March 1. There are multiple categories, and the $75 entry fee covers the membership fee. Most journalists first learn about NAREE because of the annual contest. Some return for the insights, sources and stories they consistently pick up every year at the conference. And if you come more than a few times, you will meet people you look forward to seeing again. It is a welcoming group and I invite you to join us this year in Austin at the Hyatt Regency Hotel from June 18 to 21. We hope to see you there!
Aldo has covered real estate, the economy and economic development at The Denver Post since 1990. He has a M.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri.