Jade Lazarevic
Jade Lazarevic covers residential and commercial property for the Newcastle Herald, using individual listings and sales to explain how the local market is shifting in price, demand and lifestyle expectations. Her stories track record-breaking results, intense buyer competition and the value added by renovation and design, so the coverage reads as a running ledger of what matters in the region’s real estate. She links properties to the people behind them – from professional athletes to television personalities and designers – which distinguishes her work from more generic price-and-data reporting.
The waterfront strip where homes keep breaking sales records
A recurring focus in Lazarevic’s coverage is prestige waterfront real estate and the way specific streets and suburbs have become magnets for high-end buyers.
She has reported on “the waterfront strip in Lake Macquarie where homes keep breaking sales records,” detailing how repeated benchmark sales along the same shoreline signal a reshaping of values in that micro-market. She writes about beachfront homes in Anna Bay that offer the “same stunning view” for around $1 million less than nearby properties, using price gaps to show how buyers trade absolute top-tier prestige for relative value. In coverage of John Parade, she highlights opportunities to buy on a coveted street “without the $10m price tag,” again anchoring local aspiration in concrete price points rather than abstract talk of affordability.
Her reporting on a Newcastle penthouse relisted after selling off-market for a record $8.5 million captures both the mechanics of prestige resales and the signalling effect those deals have on surrounding stock. She also brings personality into waterfront and coastal coverage, as in her story on professional free surfer Craig Anderson achieving a strong gain on the sale of a Merewether property, where the profile of the vendor becomes part of the market narrative.[anchor]
Investors battle it out across dozens of bids
Alongside prestige homes, Lazarevic regularly covers investor activity and competition for income-producing properties.
In a piece on a dual-income property in Charlestown, she reports on investors “battling it out across 35 bids” to secure the asset, using the number of offers to illustrate how intense the contest has become for well-located, cash-flow-focused stock. She shows the structure of these deals – dual-income and similar configurations – to explain why they attract heavy investor interest beyond simple yield calculations.
Stories such as the John Parade listing without a $10 million price tag frame aspirational locations through the lens of what buyers at different budget levels are actually competing for. Her coverage of a waterfront strip where homes keep breaking records similarly draws out investor and owner-occupier motivations, tying repeated high sales to a narrative of confidence in specific pockets of Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and the Hunter region.
Across these pieces, she treats auction results, guide prices and bidding depth as signals of sentiment and strategy in the market rather than as isolated datapoints.
Elegant renovations that add millions in value
Renovation, design and value-add work are another consistent thread in Lazarevic’s reporting.
She has written about an “elegant renovation” that added $2 million in value to a Hamilton South classic, using before-and-after figures to show how considered upgrades can materially reset a property’s worth. In a story headlined “‘Nothing else like it’: interior designer Tim Neve lists renovation project in Mayfield,” she focuses on a design-led renovation and the way a distinctive aesthetic and layout differentiate the listing in a crowded market.
Her coverage extends to new developments as well, including a first look inside a new Kallio towers 63‑unit project in Newcastle, where she details the configuration and positioning of the building to show how multi-unit developments are being pitched to buyers. Across these renovation and development pieces, she pays attention to how architecture, interiors and amenity translate into specific guide prices, uplift amounts and resale potential.
The emphasis on concrete value shifts – millions added through renovation, guide ranges for new stock – makes her renovation coverage more transactional and less purely lifestyle-driven than generic home features.
Landmark buildings, celebrity-linked deals and a property beat built from entertainment
Lazarevic also devotes regular attention to commercial and landmark properties and to sales involving well-known public figures. Her story on a landmark building in Hunter Street Mall listed with a guide of $5 million examines how a key site in a retail precinct is being repositioned, detailing the campaign structure through expressions-of-interest and the timeframes attached to the sale.
She has covered listings tied to media personalities, such as Gogglebox star Jad Nehmetallah’s Sydney unit marketed with a $1.6 million guide, using the vendor’s profile to draw readers into what is still, fundamentally, a detailed real estate campaign story.
These pieces sit alongside the Craig Anderson Merewether sale and other personality-linked transactions, forming a consistent strand where celebrity or public recognition is an entry point to market detail rather than the story’s end point.[anchor] Her property work appears both in the Newcastle Herald and on national property platforms within the same network, including View, extending the reach of these localised stories beyond a single masthead. Lazarevic’s approach to the beat is shaped by a long stint on the entertainment side of the newsroom: she joined the Newcastle Herald as a reporter in 2001, spent 15 years covering entertainment, and moved into a national property role in 2022. Earlier feature work included pieces on cafes with all-day breakfast and hospitality culture, and that background shows in her ability to use narrative, character and setting without losing sight of the hard numbers that drive property decisions.
Across this body of work, the defining pattern is her habit of grounding big themes – prestige escalation, investor competition, renovation-driven value shifts and commercial repositioning – in specific addresses, prices and campaigns. The result is property coverage that reads as a clear map of what is moving in the market, who is driving those moves and how much money is at stake.
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.