Who’s on the editorial team?
David Hatcher
David has a particular depth of expertise and contact base in corporate M&A, debt, fund management and logistics. His biggest scoops include the largest European real estate deal of all time, the €12.25bn sale of Blackstone’s Logicor to CIC, Brookfield and QIA’s £2.6bn take-private of Canary Wharf Group and the refinancing of the £1bn HSBC Tower.
James Buckley
James has a vast contact base in the property industry and has a track record of breaking stories on the largest investment transactions, with a particular focus on the London market. Some of James’s scoops include: CC Land’s £1.15bn acquisition of The Cheesegrater; NPS’s £1.16bn purchase of Goldman Sachs’ HQ; Barclays’ 540,000 sq ft Docklands sub-lease to the Cabinet Office; and EBRD’s 350,000 sq ft relocation of its City HQ to Canary Wharf.
Chris Borland
Chris brings a unique angle to real estate reporting having worked across the industry as an agent, communications adviser and journalist at two of the biggest publications – CoStar News and Property Week. At CoStar, over a five-year period, Chris led a concerted push to deliver more exclusive news to the ‘Big 6’ regional cities and drove market engagement.
A contact list stretching the length and breadth of the UK & Ireland helped Chris establish himself as one the country’s leading regional journalists. Notable scoops include TPG’s £450m acquisition of the Arlington business parks portfolio, M&G funding one of the UK’s largest single office developments, Birmingham’s £120m 3 Snowhill, and revealing sites for over 1m sq ft of Government Property Agency office locations.
Charlie Schouten
Charlie has extensive experience covering property and construction, with a special focus on the North of England, having worked for Construction News and Place North West. He started his career as Construction News’ Northern Correspondent, and then moved Place North West in Manchester, initially as a senior reporter and then as a deputy editor.
With extensive contacts across construction, property, architecture, and investment community across the North, Charlie has a focus on exclusive news content and interviews. Born, raised, and based in Manchester, Charlie is passionate about covering all aspects of property in the region. Some of Charlie’s biggest exclusive stories have been Renaker’s purchase of Trinity Islands in Manchester, revealing the location of BT’s new Manchester regional hub and GCHQ’s Manchester city centre office and the anchor tenant Liverpool’s £200m Pall Mall.
Guy Montague-Jones
Before Property Week, Guy covered the supermarket and food industry at The Grocer, one of the UK’s biggest trade publications. He started his journalism career at Decision News Media in France.
Jessica Middleton-Pugh
Jessica Middleton-Pugh is React News’ residential and retail correspondent, leading on expanding the publication’s coverage of these diverse and rapidly-changing sectors. She was previously editor of leading regional property news website Place North West, guiding editorial and event coverage over the course of six years in the retail, residential, industrial, and commercial markets, and acting as the face of the business to readers made up of property investors, developers, councils, advisors, architects and contractors.
Julie Cruz
Julie has been a financial journalist for over 10 years. She covered global equities and Europe’s retail/consumer-goods sector for Bloomberg News in London and Frankfurt before becoming the managing editor of Property Investor Europe in 2016 – overseeing a team of reporters and editors across Europe. In 2019, she led the rebranding of the publication as it increased its focus on institutional investors and fundraising and became Real Estate Fund Intelligence.
Originally from France, Julie spent more than eight years in Germany before moving back to London in 2017. She has been covering all European real estate markets across asset classes for almost five years and has a vast contact base in the industry.
Julie oversees React News’ European coverage, breaking news on major capital markets deals and fundraising and writing heavyweight analysis and interviews.
Alessia Pirolo
Alessia has over ten years of experience in business and financial journalism with focus on banking, distressed debt, and real estate. She has a unique expertise in the non-performing loans market having covered most NPL deals across Europe since 2015, for a total volume of almost EUR 600bn.
For five years at Debtwire, she moved from being a reporter to developing and being in charge of an NPL-focused product combining breaking news, data, and analysis.
Previously, she covered U.S. and European commercial real estate for the Wall Street Journal and the Commercial Observer. Alessia started her career as a journalist covering the court in her hometown Padua for the local issue of Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. She holds a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
As a finance editor at React News she covers the distressed debt market, loan origination and refinancing.
Amy Finch
Amy is a senior European correspondent who leads reporting European residential property transactions, trends and dynamics at React News. She joined the team from Debtwire, where most recently she was responsible for coverage of non-performing loan transactions across Europe. Before that she was a data journalist reporting on loan portfolio sales and compiled a comprehensive database of European deals as well as producing regular long-form analysis features on the NPL market.
Amy has a Master of Arts degree in journalism from City University, as well as Master of Science degree in biology from Bristol University.
Amaya Urgoiti Basurto
Amaya is the senior French correspondent, reporting on transactions and trends across all sectors in the French market. She joined React News from mtn-i, where she reported on the gloabl debt markets across Asia and Europe. Prior to this, she was the real estate Southern Europe correspondent for Debtwire, where she reported on transactions in the French, Spanish and Portuguese markets, as well as producing features on events affecting those markets.
Originally from Spain, Amaya moved to London five years ago to starte her career as a journalist. She holds a degree in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Salamanca.
Elena Dragulele
Elena is a reporter and content strategist with a knack for telling stories and a flair for detail. She joined React News from PropertyEU in 2022, where she focused on breaking deals across the UK and continental Europe.
As a pan-European logistics reporter, she reports on transactions and trends across continental Europe.
Elena has a BA in International Relations from Queen Mary University of London, is originally from Romania and also speaks Spanish.
Mira Kaizl
Mira has a deep knowledge of all real estate sectors and their German protagonists. She loves interviewing people as much as digging in business reports if they might contain a well-hidden news story.
Prior to joining React, Mira was senior news editor at German news provider Thomas Daily, where she worked for over a decade, overseeing the coverage of German fund companies, portfolio transactions and logistics real estate.
Mira has a masters degree in Spanish literature and journalism. Before becoming a real estate journalist in 2012, she worked for a German local newspaper, and as a freelance business journalist.
Michael Minarzik
Michael specialises in exclusive news on commercial deals, lettings and new project developments and can call on an extensive network of key players. Together with Mira Kaizl, he forms the German team at React News and reports on the most important news from the top German locations.
Michael joined React from CoStar and Thomas Daily, where he spent 16 years covering German property market events, most recently as senior editor focusing on southern Germany and Munich in particular.
Raised in Düsseldorf, he has lived in Freiburg in south-west Germany since 1999.
Robert Hinneburg
Robert has been working as a real estate editor in Germany since 2008, and has since built up a broad base of knowledge across all asset classes, as well as a large network of contacts in the industry.
He joined React after spending 15 years at Thomas Daily and CoStar, including 13 years as head of department for Berlin and eastern Germany. He holds a degree in urban geography, cartography and sociology.
Robert grew up in Berlin and spent more than 30 years there, and although he has lived in Freiburg since 2007, the real estate market of his home city is particularly close to his heart.
Francesco Magon
Based in Paris, Francesco focuses on all regions and sectors across France. As an expert on French politics and news, he also studies and analyses the impact they have on the real estate business.
Before joining React News, Francesco covered legal news for Leaders League-Décidéurs, and sport for Autonews.fr. In addition to online reporting, Francesco works as a radio reporter at Radio Aligre FM. He also regularly attends cultural projects organised by the Italian consulate in Paris.
Originally from Italy, Francesco moved to Paris in 2017. He speaks Italian, French and English, and has a bachelors degree from the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna and a masters degree from the Sorbonne University.