Feeding [off] the frenzy: a case study of platform influence on housing mortgage transactions in Australia

Australian households, despite stagnated wages and job precarity, accept the prevailing neoliberal discourse promoting housing ownership facilitated by debt as their 'path to wealth'. The resultant housing 'frenzy' fuels a volatile situation of high housing prices and household indebtedness, with low housing affordability and increasing social inequality. This paper identifies the strategic repositioning of powerful media as influential players in housing finance in a financialised yet weakly-regulated environment, through a study of a mortgage portal embedded in Australia's predominant property platform, realestate.com.au. It reveals how digital media company REA Group, majority-owned by media conglomerate News Corporation, acquired mortgage brokerages and bank partnerships, using their portal to direct millions of Australians to lending in which they have a pecuniary interest, while controlling the discourse and harvesting data. The interdisciplinarity of this initiative has left it under-researched and overlooked by scholars and policy-makers. This mixed-methods case study extends the integration of media in housing studies and alerts readers to its compelling implications.