Catherine Reagor, The Arizona Republic, on 30 Years Covering Phoenix Real Estate
Catherine Reagor, senior real estate reporter, The Arizona Republic. Beat: Metro Phoenix housing, home sales, development and evictions.
Who this is
Catherine Reagor has covered Metro Phoenix real estate for The Arizona Republic for roughly 30 years, through the boom, the crash, the recovery, the pandemic and the eviction crisis that followed. Catherine Reagor came to Arizona State University as a pre-law student, moved to journalism, interned at a business journal and took her first full-time newsroom job at the Denver Business Journal in 1990 covering airlines, banks and tourism. The Arizona Republic hired Catherine Reagor to cover real estate and she has held the beat since. Catherine Reagor is a Cronkite School graduate, a former adjunct professor, and she launched the Republic’s real estate site Street Scout.
In this Off Deadline conversation with Proof Publicity founder Melissa DiGianfilippo, Catherine Reagor talks about why she is protective of the beat, how she reads the market against the headlines, and where her reporting comes from. Her answer to that last one is not data, it is people. Arizona has some of the best public real estate records in the country, Catherine Reagor says, and reporters elsewhere ask her how she gets her numbers, but the deals that are not yet public come from sources she has built over decades, several of whom became friends. Catherine Reagor also describes the story that changed her: following a single house, lot 113 in Verrado, in 2004, and finding through an economist that one of every three dollars in the state economy at the time traced back to real estate.
Catherine Reagor is direct about the part of the beat that PR people complain about. Catherine Reagor writes the priciest home sales because the records are public and the stories get read, and she says that traffic is what buys her the room to cover evictions and housing insecurity. Catherine Reagor has one piece of practical advice for anyone whose client does not want their name in a home sale story, and it costs about a thousand dollars.
In their words
“The sky is not falling. This is not anything like the great recession, believe me. And the people it impacts, everybody is impacted by real estate.”
“Because I write about these homes, I can write about evictions. I can cover both.”
“We have the best real estate records in the country. Reporters across the country ask me, how do you get that data? The smart thing is listening to smart people.”
“Someone spends 15 million dollars cash on a house and I am thinking, you can get an LLC for a thousand dollars.”
“Those stories changed me. I had always been kind of a business reporter, and that really brought me into the human side.”
What this means if you are pitching real estate, Proof’s take
Two things worth taking from this. First, a reporter who has held a beat for 30 years is not looking for your announcement, she is looking for the number underneath it, and she can usually pull the record herself. Bring her the data and the human being it happened to. Second, if your client is buying property and does not want to be a headline, sort out the ownership structure before the closing, not after the story runs. Proof Publicity handles both sides of that conversation for real estate and development clients.
Watch the full episode
Proof Publicity works with homebuilders, developers and communities across Arizona. See our real estate and development PR work.