Emily Power
Emily Power explains shifts in Australia’s property market by pairing hard data with vivid stories from individual suburbs and standout sales. She is a specialist property reporter and editor with almost two decades in newsrooms, including a tenure as editor of Domain’s magazine, and has built a career focused on real estate and housing coverage. Her work sits at the intersection of prices, policy and the decisions buyers and renters make, using market research and sales evidence to show how trends play out street by street.
Market shifts and suburb-level dynamics
Power’s reporting regularly tracks how house prices move at the suburb level, highlighting both rising markets and areas that have fallen out of favour. She has examined Melbourne suburbs that are leading house price growth outside the usual hotspots, focusing on the new postcodes where buyer demand and median values are surging.
Her coverage of suburbs knocked out of Australia’s “million-dollar clubs” uses changes in median prices to show how prestige benchmarks can be lost as quickly as they are gained.
In pieces on locations where prices jumped by hundreds of thousands of dollars within a single quarter, she leans on the Domain House Price Report and similar datasets to quantify the pace of change. Across these stories, she ties local movements back to broader economic and lending conditions, making market volatility understandable through specific examples rather than general commentary.
Prestige, heritage and unusual sales
Power often uses individual sales to illustrate what buyers value and how far competition can push prices.
Her report on a battered Queenslander in Brisbane selling for $1.753 million shows how renovation potential and land value can outweigh a home’s condition when multiple bidders compete. A story on a driveway lot in Petrie Terrace that sold for $895,000 in a frenzied auction captures the intensity of demand in tightly held inner-city locations, even when the asset is unconventional.
She also covers landmark properties such as the historic St Albans Homestead, drawing out heritage features, racing links and lifestyle appeal to explain why some estates command attention beyond their price tag. In work on luxury home buyers, she explores the split between those driving the top end of the market higher and others hesitating in the face of economic uncertainty, again grounding the narrative in real transactions. These pieces show a consistent focus on how individual deals reflect deeper patterns in prestige and character housing.
Interest rates, tax settings and buyer impact
Power connects policy changes and monetary decisions directly to buyer budgets and market sentiment. In coverage of the scrapping of stamp duty for certain off-the-plan buyers in Victoria, she reports on industry reaction and the potential for larger savings, framing the reform as a step toward easing the tax burden on purchasers.
Her reporting on Reserve Bank interest rate decisions, including a cash rate rise to 4.10 per cent, links the cost of borrowing to expectations for future price growth and to the likelihood of any rate cuts in the following year. She uses commentary from economists and survey data to show how lenders, investors and home-seekers interpret these moves.
By placing tax and rate settings alongside real-world purchasing scenarios, her stories help explain why some segments of the market accelerate while others stall when costs change.
Rental affordability and living costs
Rental markets and affordability are a recurring thread in Power’s work. She has written on how Melbourne became the cheapest city in Australia to rent a house, using comparative rent data to demonstrate the shift in relative value between capitals. In analysis pieces, she explores the idea that it is possible to rent for less than the cost of a family-sized trolley of groceries, using that contrast to underline how housing costs sit within household budgets. Her stories on rental pressures consider vacancy rates, asking prices and tenant competition, but always return to clear figures that show what renters are actually paying. This focus on rents and everyday cost comparisons broadens her beat beyond sales and auctions, keeping attention on households that are not yet, or may never be, buyers.
Property editing and broadcast work
Alongside reporting, Power has held senior editorial roles in property coverage, including serving as editor of Domain’s magazine and as a property editor for a major digital news site. She has overseen weekly property features for print mastheads, shaping coverage on significant transactions, market research and lifestyle-focused home stories.
In recent years she has moved into freelance work, filing property news and features for Domain and other metropolitan titles while continuing to work as a broadcaster and commentator on real estate topics. She is also a published author, drawing on her reporting experience to write about housing and related themes. This combination of newsroom, editing, broadcasting and author work underpins a perspective that is firmly grounded in reporting yet broad enough to situate individual property stories within the wider housing conversation.
4 more real estate journalists.
Aleisha Dawson
Aleisha Dawson covers property where prestige deals, hard market data and lifestyle stories meet, with a particular focus on high-profile apartments and new projects in South East Queensland. She is a regional real estate editor within News Corp’s property network, overseeing property coverage for the Gold Coast Bulletin and contributing to Realestate.com.au’s property news. Her beat spans record-setting penthouse sales, off-market prestige deals, new apartment releases in landmark projects, and one-off high-value homes used as case studies in buyer behaviour. She tracks land and apartment markets with a data-led approach, using specific price points, volume figures and suburb lists. Dawson also reports on quirky homes, celebrity property, pop culture-linked locations and technology-shaped renovations, and her stories are widely republished by developers, agents and project marketers.
Blair Jackson
Blair Jackson explains housing through money: how prices, policy and banks shape the way people buy, sell and live. He is a reporter with the national wire service NewsWire, covering real estate and household finance across Australia. His work follows housing downturns, price movements, negative equity, mortgages, first-home buyers and existing borrowers. He reports on renters, poor housing conditions, high rents, repairs, affordability and housing inequality. He examines zoning, supply targets, tax changes, construction limits, development decisions and efforts to fix housing shortages. His finance coverage includes mortgage fraud, bank risk, interest rates, household costs and windfalls used to pay off property. He also covers auctions, listings, luxury homes, renovations and major developments. Jackson combines data, policy analysis, expert warnings, open-home and auction detail, and personal examples to show how financial decisions affect households and communities.
Bonnie Campbell
Bonnie Campbell is a luxury property reporter for The Australian Financial Review who focuses on the very top of the residential market, where big-ticket homes, mega-mansions and high-profile sales set and test price records. She covers trophy properties, record-breaking deals and prestige streets, using individual sales as case studies in how wealth, status and grand houses move through the market. Her stories track extreme price movements, large-scale renovations, unusual features and multi-million dollar listings, and link them to high-net-worth buyers, business leaders and public figures. She repeatedly returns to prestige coastal, resort and lifestyle markets, explaining how scarcity, views and amenity support multi-million dollar valuations. Alongside single-property features, she produces roundups of major luxury deals to show patterns in where the biggest money flows and which houses define the top end.
Caroline Delaney
Caroline Delaney is a senior property and features journalist at the Irish Examiner whose work links individual homes, damaged houses and outdoor spaces to the wider housing landscape. She covers residential listings with clear, price‑led pieces on specific homes coming to market, highlighting core details such as guide price, size, house type and a plain sense of location. Her property features look at fire damage and repair, treating house fires as a structural issue for the housing market and following cases through court proceedings and the process of putting homes right. She also reports on outdoor spaces and synthetic lawns, including environmental experts’ views on plastic turf in domestic gardens. Her news and features background keeps the tone fact‑led rather than promotional and gives her coverage a practical focus on aspiration, risk and everyday use of housing.