The slow burn and hard slog of a cracker investigation
Sometimes as an editor you hear a pitch from a journalist and you just know it’s going to work.
I had that experience with Aisha Dow when she put forward the idea that she would like to try to wrap her arms around real estate underquoting.
That was more than 18 months ago, and last weekend you saw the result – a stunning and unprecedented expose built on data so sweeping and robust that it was praised by both consumer groups and agents.
It led our website and our newspaper for days, so I’m sure you’ve seen it. Underquoting is a maddening phenomenon and one that has been written about for years, with some excellent work by our colleagues at The Age and in other media.
But Dow’s project was something nobody else had tried. It required building a team, starting with Sydney colleague and data journalist Nigel Gladstone. I’m not certain that he would have said yes if he had known what he was agreeing to all those months ago.
He built scrapers that crawled real estate advertisements tracking the advertised price and the sale price. Simple? Far from it. We had properties that sold more than once, properties listed with different agents on different sites, typos on prices, wrong agents credited – it was a nightmare.
To keep it all straight, Gladstone had to manually tend his spreadsheets with dedication through his holidays, including a trip to New Zealand. The result? Spotless data that had not one glove of criticism laid on it.
Throughout, Dow knuckled down analysing the data alongside our visual stories team – particularly Mark Stehle and Nathanael Scott – figuring out what it told us and how we could tell readers.
After months of data collection, a trend became clear. Half the time buyers were wasting their time if they believed the price they were told – supposedly framed by legislative requirements.
A few months ago we roped in The Sydney Morning Herald’s property reporting legend Lucy Macken.
Dow and Macken trawled the examples and trends to identify case studies and auctions worth dissecting to produce a spectacular series of stories.
In Victoria, by the time we had published the first two days of coverage, the state’s peak real estate lobby group had joined calls from the state opposition, the Greens and numerous consumer advocates for immediate change.
In fact, right now, the only player who seems to think the current system is OK is the state government. Premier Jacinta Allan and her ministers have told our reporters repeatedly this week that Victoria has a tough system and a department that is not tolerating one bit of bad behaviour.
This claim, of course, looks past the holes in the rules that our data proves agents have driven a truck through.
The idea that, in a flat real estate market, there were about 13,000 surprisingly runaway auctions that breached the top of the advertised range doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny.
The government has made half-hearted noises that it will look at proposals for change. It probably has them already, given that it conducted a review in 2022 that it has steadfastly refused to make public – fighting Dow’s attempt to get the report through freedom of information.
Now there is a demand from the state parliament to force its production. We shall see if that bears fruit. Even its author is bewildered.
The point of all of this is that journalism – really impactful, difficult journalism – takes time and resources as well as skill and dedication.
The Age – together with The Sydney Morning Herald – is one of a diminishing number of outlets pursuing journalism with this level of ambition, and we can only do it because of your support.
This was why I wanted to write about the development of this project. It is exactly the kind of unique, long-burn and difficult work that your subscription allows us to do. There is a direct line from your support to this work and its results.
In that context, it is worth pointing to another hard-fought win from the past week. Charlotte Grieve, together with Tom Steinfort and Nat Clancy, has spent the past three years fighting a lawsuit from star surgeon Munjed Al Muderis brought against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes.
He claimed that the series, led by Grieve from The Age’s investigative team, had unfairly painted him as negligent – among many other things – by telling the stories of patients who suffered at his hands.
Last Friday, Al Muderis, NSW Australian of the Year in 2020, suffered a complete and utter defeat in his defamation action.
A group of us watched the stream in The Age conference room, and it was one of the those moments we’ll all remember.
Grieve withstood the longest witness-box interrogation by a journalist in such a trial, in front of Sue Chrysanthou, SC. She came through with flying colours as Justice Wendy Abraham not only backed all of Grieve’s reporting, but emphatically endorsed her conduct and evidence.
The case made history by being the first time a publication had defended itself in a defamation case successfully using a public interest defence.
This week Grieve was back reporting on Al Muderis, exposing his misleading testimony in the trial about his work with major charities and links to a top university. She’s not done yet, with more stories coming at the weekend.
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