The property platform that owned your property reporter

Australia has a median price-to-income ratio of 8.2, placing it in the ‘Severely Unaffordable’ category according to Demographia International Housing Affordability. Four major Australian cities (Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Brisbane) are rated ‘Impossibly Unaffordable’ with median multiples above 9.

Sydney’s median house price reached approximately A$1.75 million by late 2025, in a city where the median household income is approximately A$126,000. A household needs to earn around A$280,000 a year to afford the median Sydney home.

Home values surged approximately 47 per cent since March 2020, adding roughly A$280,000 to the median dwelling value. The cost of servicing a new mortgage now sits at 45 per cent of household income, well above the 30 per cent ‘housing stress’ threshold.

The richest 1 per cent of Australians receive approximately A$12.9 billion of the A$21.8 billion subsidy.

That last figure is worth reading again. Australia foregoes A$21.8 billion a year in revenue to subsidise property investment. Most of that subsidy flows to the wealthiest Australians. And the media companies best placed to campaign against this arrangement are the ones whose platforms profit from the property market it inflates.

REA Group was founded in 1995 and listed on the ASX. News Corp acquired a controlling stake, approximately 61 per cent in recent years. REA’s market capitalisation reached approximately A$30 to A$35 billion in 2024.

realestate.com.au now claims average traffic of 11.9 million viewers per month and approximately 85 per cent market share in residential property listings, roughly four times the size of its nearest rival, Domain. No other platform comes close. REA is the Australian property market’s tollgate.

In 2016, REA Group entered the mortgage market through a partnership with National Australia Bank. In 2017, it purchased mortgage brokerages, allowing it to earn fees when users of realestate.com.au took out home loans through its platform. The site was redesigned to embed a mortgage portal, directing 11.9 million monthly users toward lending through REA’s own channels.

In October 2024, REA Group went further: it purchased a 19.9 per cent stake in Athena Home Loans, a digital non-bank lender. REA now profits directly from mortgages offered through Mortgage Choice to users who found their property on realestate.com.au.

News Corp, a foreign-owned media company, now has a direct stake in framing the Australian housing narrative and influencing policy, while profiting through its property platform from listings, data, and its own mortgages.The Conversation, February 2026 [4]

Consider what News Corp now earns from a single Australian trying to buy a home. When they search for properties: REA Group listing fees. When they read about housing policy: advertising revenue from News Corp papers. When they apply for a mortgage through realestate.com.au: Mortgage Choice brokerage fees. When they provide their financial data to access REA’s tools: data monetisation.

Nine Entertainment’s relationship with the property market was structurally identical to News Corp’s, though it has now been partially resolved by the sale of Domain.

When Nine merged with Fairfax Media in 2018 it inherited Domain Group, Fairfax’s property listings platform and realestate.com.au’s main competitor. For seven years, Nine’s journalists at the SMH and The Age investigated and reported on the housing affordability crisis, negative gearing, developer accountability, and property policy reform, while their employer collected listing fees on every property advertised on Domain.com.au.

In May 2025, Nine announced it had agreed to sell its 60.1 per cent stake in Domain to American property data company CoStar Group, in a deal valuing Domain at A$3 billion. Nine received approximately A$1.4 billion for its stake. The transaction completed in August 2025.

On its face, this resolves the most acute conflict. But for the seven years that Nine owned both the SMH, The Age, and Domain simultaneously, how did that ownership shape coverage? Were stories about reforming negative gearing, which would reduce transaction volumes and therefore Domain’s revenue, treated with the same editorial freedom as stories that didn’t threaten the parent company’s balance sheet?

Consider some of the stories about housing policy that received persistent, prominent coverage in News Corp publications. Coverage framing housing undersupply as the primary cause of the crisis, while rarely examining the role of negative gearing. Extensive promotion of first home buyer grants and deposit schemes, which multiple economists have documented as primarily inflating prices. Coverage of foreign buyers as a primary driver of unaffordability, while economists consistently find this is not a major factor.

And consider what received less sustained treatment. The A$21.8 billion annual cost of negative gearing and the capital gains discount, and specifically who benefits. The structural conflict between News Corp owning realestate.com.au and covering housing affordability. REA Group’s expansion into mortgage broking and lending; a February 2026 Conversation article described this as having ‘until now, escaped attention’.

None of this proves editorial interference. What it shows is that the topics most inconvenient to the owners’ financial interests consistently received less sustained investigative coverage than the topics that did not threaten those interests. That is how structural conflict of interest works.

The single most discussed housing reform in Australia over the past decade has been negative gearing: the tax concession that allows property investors to write off losses on their rental properties against their overall income.

Multiple independent economists, the IMF, the Grattan Institute, and the Parliamentary Budget Office have found that negative gearing contributes to housing unaffordability by incentivising speculative property investment, inflating prices, and removing properties from the stock available to owner-occupiers.

Labor took a policy to the 2019 federal election to limit negative gearing. It lost. After that loss, and after a second defeat in 2022, Labor quietly dropped the policy.

What role did Australia’s property-platform-owning media conglomerates play in framing the debate around negative gearing reform? News Corp’s papers, whose parent company controls Australia’s dominant property listings platform, were not advocates for reform. Nine’s papers, whose parent company held a 60 per cent stake in Domain, were not leading the charge either.

The negative gearing and capital gains discount subsidy, A$21.8 billion annually, overwhelmingly benefits the property investors who generate the transactions that power both REA and Domain. The outcome of the 2019 and 2022 elections ensured negative gearing survived. Australian housing affordability continued its record deterioration. REA Group’s revenue continued growing.

realestate.com.au embeds financial profiling tools throughout its platform. Users searching for properties routinely enter their income, savings, desired loan size, current rental costs, and financial situation into calculators and profile tools. As the platform with approximately 85 per cent market share in residential searches, it captures this data from the overwhelming majority of Australians actively looking to buy or rent.

This financial data (11.9 million monthly users worth) is an extraordinarily valuable asset. It can be used to target mortgage products, to inform REA’s own lending services through Mortgage Choice and Athena, to sell to advertisers, and to inform News Corp’s own data partnerships.

Australians using realestate.com.au to search for somewhere to live are, knowingly or not, providing their financial profile to a Murdoch-controlled company that also publishes the news they read about housing policy. No disclosure is made to users about how their financial data may interact with the editorial decisions of News Corp’s journalism properties.

Australia is in the middle of a housing affordability crisis that is genuinely damaging millions of lives. Young Australians are locked out of home ownership. Renters face costs consuming a third of their income. The gap between the housing haves and have-nots is widening at a pace not seen since Federation.

The media organisations best placed to investigate the structural causes of this crisis (negative gearing, investor tax subsidies, the failure of successive governments to reform the tax treatment of property) are the ones with the most to gain from the market conditions that created the crisis.

News Corp controls both the newspapers that cover housing policy and the platform that earns listing fees, mortgage fees, and data revenue from the market those policies shape. Nine Entertainment covered the housing crisis for seven years while holding a sixty per cent stake in the second-largest property listings platform.

This is the rort. Not a conspiracy. A structural arrangement in which the financial interests of media owners are so deeply entangled with the housing market that independent coverage of that market is, at minimum, compromised.