Philly Inquirer names new real estate reporter

Philadelphia Inquirer business editor Karl Stark sent out the following announcement on Wednesday to the staff:

We are excited to announce that Caitlin McCabe will join the Business News team as our new residential real estate writer.

As a journalist, Caitlin has gotten used to occupying some coveted real estate. Her story with Grace Toohey on unsolved murders in Chester — showing how one woman has had four family members murdered in the last two years and none of those cases were solved — garnered 4,000 Facebook shares and 30,000 hits on Philly.com along with running on A1.

Caitlin, who started here in March 2015 focused on Delaware County, has covered everything from the Amtrak train crash to the arrested-then-exonerated Temple physicist to a presidential candidate named Donald Trump. Colleagues are amazed at how deeply she reports and how well she writes. She came here fully formed after internships at Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the Charlotte Observer’s business desk.

Caitlin also is a strategic thinker who is mapping out possibilities for how we can do our jobs in the future. As a suburban reporter, Caitlin, along with SPP’s three other county reporters, brainstormed and proposed together a morning newsletter based on The Skimm that would deliver a daily accounting of the best suburban stories.

In her memo outlining her approach to the beat, she also cited databases from the Census Bureau to ProPublica’s “The Rent Racket,” and  proposed creating a web page of tax burdens town-by-town so readers can track their communities and compare them to others.

“The Philadelphia real estate market is experiencing an incredible boom, which makes now an exciting time to be chronicling its growth — determining who is benefiting, who is missing out, and who is getting hurt as the market expands,” she wrote.

Please join us in congratulating Caitlin.