Viva Hyde
Viva Hyde is a senior real estate reporter for Realestate.com.au and other News Corp mastheads, covering how property markets, consumer risk and lifestyle intersect across Australia. Her work combines data-led analysis of investment trends and affordability with narrative features built around individual homes, suburbs and their owners. She treats real estate as a news beat, using property stories to chart shifts in market conditions, construction standards and the ways families and investors respond.
'Top 25 investment hotspots' and market turning points
Hyde regularly writes on national and regional market dynamics, with a particular focus on where investment and home ownership are becoming more or less attractive. In the “Top 25 Aus investment hotspots revealed: Where to buy now” piece, she leans on detailed price growth data and director commentary to identify suburbs combining strong returns with broader recovery stories. Her coverage of Hobart suburbs where buying will soon beat renting breaks down the moment specific areas cross from rental dominance to ownership viability, using suburb-level projections and timelines rather than broad capital-city averages. A feature on Gold Coast real estate surging ahead of the 2032 Olympics similarly uses new market data to connect future infrastructure and event planning to current price movements, signalling how long-term catalysts are already priced into local property.
Across these rounds, she favours clear explanations of numbers, naming streets and suburbs and attaching them to practical inflection points such as yield shifts, rent-buy break-even dates and investment “hotspot” rankings.
'Tiled with a chainsaw': Tracking dodgy builders
Hyde’s reporting on construction quality and consumer protection is more investigative in tone, built around vivid case material and the tools regulators and insurers now use to identify poor workmanship. In “‘Tiled with a chainsaw’: Heatmaps deployed to hunt dodgy builders”, she reports on how data heatmaps are being used to isolate clusters of complaints and defects, turning what might be isolated renovation horror stories into patterns of risk and accountability. The piece sets out specific examples of shoddy work and then follows the trail to the systems designed to catch repeat offenders, connecting household-level distress to broader regulatory responses.
This strand of her coverage complements her market work by focusing less on prices and more on what buyers and owners encounter once they are in their homes, especially when shortcuts in building or renovation leave them exposed.
Inside celebrity homes and surf clubs
Hyde also writes lifestyle-led property features that use well-known names and distinctive buildings to explore the upper end of the market. In the story on Lleyton and Bec Hewitt’s “lush musical houses life”, she walks through the couple’s portfolio, detailing purchase prices, discounts and gains, and tying them to how the properties fit their family and public image.
Her work on AFL star Lance “Buddy” Franklin and Jesinta Franklin’s purchase of a Gold Coast mansion tracks the size of the spend, the style of the home and its place within a broader pattern of high-profile buyers targeting prestige coastal stock. A feature on the original Mermaid Beach Surf Club’s “secret new life” turns a former community building into the centre of a real estate narrative, showing how renovation and auction campaigns can transform familiar local landmarks into sought-after homes.
She occasionally extends this storytelling style into imaginative valuations, such as asking what the fictional 17 Cherry Tree Lane from the Mary Poppins books would be worth in today’s market, using the exercise to explain how condition, street character and neighbourhood status translate into pricing.
How families and buyers navigate the market
Beyond investors and celebrities, Hyde reports on how everyday buyers and their families structure deals and manage risk in changing conditions.
In coverage of why South Australian parents are changing how they help their children buy property, she focuses on the rising use of guarantor loans over direct cash gifts, spelling out how these arrangements work and why they are becoming more common. She links lender requirements, deposit hurdles and intergenerational wealth transfers to the practical choices families make, giving equal weight to financial mechanics and lived experience. In her affordability and rent-versus-buy pieces, she often positions suburbs and price points in the context of entry-level buyers and upgraders, showing not only where the numbers stack up but how they influence real decisions on timing and location.
This emphasis keeps households at the centre of her market reporting rather than treating property solely as an abstract asset class.
Property journalist across News Corp titles
Hyde brings a long general news background to the property round, which gives her real estate coverage a harder-news edge. She began as a cadet reporter for the Daily Telegraph, where she shared a Walkley Award for coverage of a disgraced former High Court justice, a story that reflects experience dealing with complex legal and institutional subjects.
She later worked as a newspaper features editor in China before moving into freelance work, broadening her familiarity with international contexts and longer-form storytelling. She subsequently joined the Gold Coast Bulletin as a real estate reporter and now works as a senior real estate journalist across News Corp titles, including Realestate.com.au.
The combination of award-winning investigative reporting, features editing and dedicated property rounds underpins a style that treats homes, builders and suburbs as subjects worthy of close scrutiny rather than mere lifestyle colour.
4 more real estate journalists.
Addie Morfoot
Addie Morfoot covers how real estate, culture and media meet, focusing on people, rules and the way homes shape a life. She reports for The New York Times on housing and lifestyle, from personal narratives about finding a home after loss to features on how short-term rental policy affects everyday owners and renters. She writes real estate stories that connect laws and regulations to the choices available to ordinary residents in specific towns and cities. She is a regular contributor to the Sunday Routine franchise, following actors, comedians and designers through a typical day and showing how settings like homes, studios and subway cars shape daily experience. She also has a long track record covering documentary film and the entertainment business, including legal questions around fair use, changing docu-series formats, festival premieres and financing. Her portfolio spans more than two decades of work for The New York Times, Variety, The Wall Street Journal and Crain’s New York Business.
Alcynna Lloyd
Alcynna Lloyd is a real estate reporter and economic journalist at Business Insider whose work is distinct for treating housing as a core economic system people must navigate. She covers how housing markets, costs, and mobility shape everyday life decisions, connecting data on rents, home prices, and city trends with stories of people managing debt, multigenerational living, and moves abroad. Her beat centers on housing costs, renters, and household strategies, following renters pushing back against landlords and tracking “desperate home sellers” using concessions in unaffordable markets. A second strand of her coverage focuses on relocation, remote work, and cheap cities as everyday economic strategies. She regularly uses rankings and lists, such as best and worst states to buy a home and Rising Stars of Real Estate, and reads city housing and migration shifts as signs of broader economic change.
Alec Lazenby
Alec Lazenby covers how provincial politics and government decisions shape housing, real estate and the wider social fabric. He reports for The Vancouver Sun from the provincial legislature. His work examines HousingHub, middle-income rentals, affordability, stalled projects, empty condos, developer layoffs, municipal housing targets and land use. He also covers health, addiction, safer supply, involuntary care, water rights, resource management, Indigenous rights and Crown land. Lazenby connects policy language to specific buildings, rents, projects, services and people. He explains financial, regulatory and market pressures, then follows how institutions, professionals, developers, municipalities and affected communities respond. His reporting tests government goals against practical outcomes and shows how policy reversals, construction costs, interest rates and political accountability shape housing and public life.
Amir Ali
Amir Ali links housing, disputes, and oddball neighbourhood stories in case-based, street-level reporting for Daily Hive. He holds a senior editorial and writing role, listed on the masthead as part of Vancouver leadership and described as a staff writer. His core beat is real estate, especially the rental market and housing affordability, tracking rent ranges, market shifts, and how pressures land on people trying to stay housed. He also covers crime, civil tribunals, and mental health, explaining decisions and conflicts in plain language that focuses on timelines, behaviour, and outcomes. Ali writes offbeat hyperlocal features, traffic and transport disruptions, business, food, and general local news, often turning infrastructure, small businesses, and civic systems into tangible stories. A former radio producer, he brings tight pacing and clear stakes to written pieces and maintains an active social media presence as a broadcaster and writer.