In The Hunt, Readers Get to Choose Their Dream Home, Too
For more than 20 years, the weekly New York Times real estate column known as The Hunt has chronicled New Yorkers' search for a home. Subjects have included college graduates looking for their first rental apartment in the city and a doctor looking to buy a beachfront home in the Hamptons — with a budget of $4 million.
What ties them all together: the travails of navigating the cutthroat New York City housing market, where waiting means losing out; remarkable candor about personal finances; and a desire to help other searchers find their own dream homes.
'We strive to feature as many different types of buyers as we can find, whether it's people with a $150,000 budget or a $1.5 million budget,' said Matthew Oshinsky, a senior staff editor on The Times's Real Estate desk, who has edited the column since 2018.
The column first appeared in The Times in 2004, but over the past several years, it has undergone a marked evolution under Mr. Oshinsky. In 2019, Vivian Toy, then the editor for Real Estate, asked him to take what had been a straightforward weekly column about New York City and transform it into an interactive quiz that would cover the entire country and, eventually, the world.
In an interview, Mr. Oshinsky, who lives in Brooklyn, discussed the process of putting the column together each week, the reader feedback he receives, and takeaways from a piece that followed up with first-time home buyers who had previously been featured. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Tell me about the reporting process for the column.
As soon as we have hunters that have agreed to be featured, a reporter and then a photographer will visit them in their new home. The actual process is pretty straightforward. Sometimes the more difficult thing is confirming that the hunters are comfortable being featured in The New York Times. Sometimes they get cold feet and back out at the last minute.
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