Mediawatch: Property news pumping up the market?
Media companies these days can’t get anything like the income they used to get from advertising. Low-cost online platforms dominate that market now.
But publicising property is highly profitable for media companies, attracting big audiences in print and online.
A US real estate firm recently paid A$3 billion to Stuff’s former owner in Australia for the housing and property platform Domain, which started out as the real estate supplement in its newspapers.
But that is dwarfed by realeastate.com.au, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and valued at about A$30b these days.
The sums are smaller here, but crucial to our biggest publishers.
Since 2018, OneRoof has become more and more important to the Herald’s publisher NZME, which deployed financial firm Jarden to work out how to maximise the value of it.
And in June, Trade Me took a 50 percent stake in Stuff’s digital wing – a deal based on the stuff.co.nz website’s huge audience as a vehicle for publicising properties for sale on Trade Me.
And aside from the stuff in sections devoted to property, news stories about the housing market and housing affordability also get plenty of engagement for news publishers.
At the same time as they are championing greed and calling it ‘investment philsophy’…
How property traders made millions flipping homes: Inside 71 Auckland real estate deals
A Herald analysis goes inside $60 million of sales by one of NZ’s biggest property traders to reveal the buy and sell prices from each of the 71 deals and the traders’ investment philosophy.
…I truly detest real estate agents and property managers.
I find them and the NZ media to be speculative property parasites.
The deal between the State and the Private Landlords is that the State will never build enough public housing to alleviate the pressure in the rental markets while receiving a $2billion dollar per year housing subsidy.
Speculators who drive up prices while benefitting from a political agreement with the State to keep the most vulnerable constantly desperate should be vilified, they certainly shouldn’t feel confident enough to boost in newspaper articles.
Selling each other houses isn’t prosperity, it’s a pyramid scheme.
Militant Renters should take to their communities at night and let those real estate signs pimping house sales in their neighbourhood know how the local renters feel with creative graffiti.
Or just smash the signs down, I’m comfortable with either or.
This Government is waging a war on renters, it’s time Landlords saw providing a fellow citizen a home is an obligation in egalitarian NZ, not a profit making operation.
There are many, many, many excellent landlords who see their responsibilities with a tenant as a sacred duty to a fellow citizen, but there are also many venal slumlords who profit off desperation.
We talk about houses a lot in NZ, we rarely mention homes.
We have allowed the Free Market to make houses commodities, not necessities.
The NZ Herald’s most profitable arm is its property speculation porn so they will promote real estate agents and property managers as aspirational and glorified.
They are parasites that rob the next generation of the dream of home ownership.
They take from today what tomorrow never brings.
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I agree 100% .My daughter sold her house recently and was treated like a second class person with the agent working for the purchaser .Her house sold at the first open home 3 days after listing at about 30k below where it should have been listed because she already had people to buy at the lower price .Then they tried to force her out into a rental before the settlement date because the new owner wanted to rent the place out .However they are first home buyers using Kiwi saver so they by law can not rent the house out .Then on settlement day they were on the door step at 9 am demanding she get out even though money had not changed hands so in fact she still owned the house .Her removal truck arrived 2 hours later and left an hour later after which she received more nasty text messages .Money was not in her bank till 4.59 pm .The fact she is a sole parent with 3 kids and was doing all the moving her self never even registered with the agent who is a bloody parasite .But wait there is more .After the deal was done she continued to advertise the house and charge another 1300 for advertising .She was using the fact that the house was the cheapest to lead more potential byers for other property she had listed .
Shocking story should have laid a complaint with the licensing crowd. I hope she didn’t pay for the late advertising.
Years ago a friend was looking at a flat in Sumner and the agent said to her ‘the owner will take less than that’! Says it all.
You would think having a knowledgeable farther like you she would not have been ripped off or abused by both agent and buyer . There are numerous complaint paths that she can take with large fines involved . I have been an agent and it is hard work with long hours and only a small percentage make a reasonable living.
Becoming a Real estate agent is something people do when they have no other vocation…it attracts the moral low end of a society in droves……
They see it as a way of making big fast money with little to no effort or skill required ….two weeks training, a phone, and a car, and away you go.
The biggest joke is that they try and make out that they are some how, ‘professionals’….their commission percentages are ridiculous…that whole system is corrupt …..3.5 to 5% on a home that often someone has taken their whole life paying off, having spent decades servicing a mortgage on.
They swan in and clip the ticket big time …because they walked some one through the house making inane no knowledge suggestions about adding on a room or ‘pushing walls out etc etc
If the clueless Penk wants the price of houses to be cheaper then he should grow a pair and stop real estate agents from charging larcenous sale commissions and introduce a single fee charge of no more than $10,000, or, a maximum commission of 1%, whichever is the lesser of the two.
This will immediately drop the price of an average house by $35,000.
Of course, Penk won’t do that because the National and Act Parties are heavily funded by real estate agents.
In conclusion, Penk is quite happy to let the pyramid scheme continue to run and run to make sure his funding mates continue to give his party money and is not actually serious about bringing the cost of houses down…. He’s yet another right wing fraud.
I think I’ve met maybe two real estate agents in my entire life who didn’t make me want to take a shower after shaking their hands. Likewise, I’ve had a couple of really nice property managers, but a number of them have been skeevy, manipulative shit-weasels who treat renters like filth and attempt to scam them into surrendering half their bond when they leave.
And why have we opened up the top end of the market to foreigners with no capital gains tax in sight? let alone a wealth tax
Perhaps they are aware that property prices are declining and want to offload their property to gullible foreign buyers as soon as possible?
Yes and government is a vast real estate agency, and commodity supplier, trying to break into the logistics business. We have had a century of being a little democracy, and now the sons and daughters of the pioneers have been shown how to make a killing, on any battleground which they care to gather at.
Here are real Sons of Pioneers with Ghost Riders in the Sky – they know how to perform and do it good. Our ghost riders travel on planes and through techworks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhSSJRuGw4c
Selling your home yourself is a great way to go. I did that with our house in Sandringham and with a house way before that in Christchurch. I saved at least $30,000 which would have gone to the salesperson in Auckland, people think it is much more complicated than it is. You need a lawyer to do the actual transfer because it is all done electronically from one lawyer to another. One woman – an agent – (I said no agents) said she would be bringing someone back to look at the house ‘she had a client’ fact is she turned up the next day with a proposal to market it way under what we got for it.
Them and used car salespeople and insurance agents. Our house is insured but I have never ever had contents insurance in 55 years and I know I am on the winning side. A fire you say oh well I will live with that have acquired too many beautiful things over the years that are not replaceable anyway. Car third party only and that is it!
It is only the insanity of a property bubble based “economy” that drives our resentment. Our governments should have known better, and their economic advisors must have known better, if they are not complete charlatans – a proposition that seems less likely with every passing day.
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