Rachelle Kroon
Rachelle Kroon covers property and housing through the lens of mortgage lending, focusing on how loan structures, bank rules and buyer decisions shape real-world outcomes.
First-home buyers and property decision traps
Her writing for Yahoo Finance Australia centres on first-home buyers, their regrets and the decision traps that arise when emotion overrides strategy in a property purchase.
In a co-authored piece on avoiding “falling in love with the wrong property”, she frames the home-buying journey around clear criteria and disciplined borrowing rather than headline prices alone. She also fronts coverage that draws out candid confessions from recent first-home buyers about what they wish they had understood before signing a contract, using those stories to anchor practical lessons on preparation and due diligence.
Property lending rules and bank policy shifts
Kroon’s distinguishing focus is on how changing bank policies and lending rules flow through to everyday borrowers, especially investors and first-home buyers. She has issued detailed warnings about lender reactions to government budgets, including instances where banks stopped honouring existing pre-approvals and tightened investor lending criteria, and she translates those moves into clear actions for borrowers such as re-checking approvals before entering contracts.
Across her audio work, she unpacks property lending mechanics in depth, with episodes dedicated to redraw facilities, valuations, bank policy changes and how those elements interact with different loan structures. This emphasis on the fine print of lending sets her apart from general real estate coverage that stays at the level of prices and clearance rates.
Investor strategy and portfolio growth
Beyond first-home buyers, Kroon spends considerable time on investor strategy and portfolio building, often working through detailed case studies.
She has hosted episodes tracking a listener’s journey from a single home purchase to a five-property portfolio in a few years, using the narrative to highlight mindset, location choices and the compounding effect of equity decisions. In another long-running case study, she examines what happens when an investment loan remains interest-only for a decade while the household focuses on paying down the home loan, laying out the numbers and trade-offs at mid-life for that strategy.
Her property investing discussions return repeatedly to questions of location selection, equity deployment and growth planning, framing each as a decision point that must be weighed against lending capacity and risk tolerance.
Podcasting and property education
Kroon extends her property coverage through the podcast This Is Property, which she co-hosts as a mortgage broker, investor and founder of Sphere Home Loans.
The show is built around a clear progression, from buying a first home to building a portfolio, and each episode mixes expert advice with real-world stories from across the property sector. She uses the platform to explain technical shifts such as changes to self-managed super fund lending for residential property, making those policy updates accessible to non-specialist borrowers. Her role as both podcast host and lending practitioner gives her commentary a dual character: she diagnoses market conditions and policy changes, then immediately translates them into steps that buyers and investors can take in their own situations.
Across outlets, her work is consistent in tone - direct, numbers-driven and focused on helping people navigate property decisions with clarity rather than hype.
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.