Is OneRoof talking down Jacinda's premium the night before her auction?
- Grant McLachlan
- Jul 8
- 5 min read
OneRoof ran its “celebrity homes don’t sell for more” story the night before Jacinda Ardern’s own auction — and its own numbers say otherwise.
On the eve of Dame Jacinda Ardern’s Sandringham auction, OneRoof published a piece asking whether celebrity ownership adds a cent to a sale price, and answered, through five real estate agents, that it mostly doesn’t.
The story ran under the headline “I don’t think it matters whether it is Jim’s house or Jacinda’s”, the same masthead that has spent the past fortnight covering the Ardern sale in granular, click-generating detail — a pattern I examined in Fame for Sale: Why Celebrity Property Hype Should Come With a Warning Label.
The real question isn’t whether fame moves a price. It’s whether OneRoof’s own reporting supports the conclusion its headline draws — or whether the story exists to get ahead of a result its publisher has a direct commercial stake in shaping.
Contents
The night before the auction
Ardern’s Sandringham bungalow goes under the hammer today, with a pre-auction estimate of $2.12 million to $2.46 million against a suburb average sale price of $1.45 million — meaning the estimate already sits somewhere between 46 and 70 percent above the local average before a single bid is placed.
OneRoof reported that gap itself a fortnight earlier, in a piece describing young families filing through open homes to see the former Prime Minister’s house.
Then, the night before the auction, the same outlet ran a separate piece arguing that fame doesn’t really move the number.
Both pieces can’t be quietly true at once.
Either a name on a title attracts enough extra interest to help explain a suburb-beating estimate, or it doesn’t — and a masthead that has built two weeks of traffic on the former shouldn’t be allowed to file the latter unchallenged, on deadline, for free.
Five agents, one interest
The claim that “it doesn’t matter whether it’s Jim’s house or Jacinda’s” rests on quotes from:
Cameron Bailey, who sold the McCaws’ home;
Jason Eves, who marketed Chelsea Winter’s;
Lorraine Young, who sold Jeremy Corbett’s; and
Jackie Parker and Kristina Marmont, who are currently marketing Julian Savea’s.
Not one of the five is a disinterested observer.
Every one of them has either banked a commission on a celebrity sale being cited as proof that celebrity doesn’t sell, or is trying to sell one right now.
Every source quoted had a listing, a sale, or a commission riding on the answer — and none of that is disclosed as a conflict anywhere in the piece.
That isn’t a minor omission.
An agent has every incentive to tell a masthead that a famous vendor’s name didn’t inflate the price: it protects the agent’s claim to have earned the result on merit, and it protects future famous clients from buyers who assume they’ll pay a premium and negotiate accordingly.
A story built entirely from that incentive isn’t evidence. It’s a talking point with a byline.
What the McCaw sale actually shows
Take the property OneRoof itself leads with.
The McCaws’ home sold for $3.775 million against a rateable value of $3.4 million — an premium of roughly 11 percent over council valuation.
That is precisely the kind of gap a curiosity effect would predict.
The agent’s quoted response was that fame “didn’t make a world of difference”.
The number in the same article says otherwise.
The sales that undercut the claim
The other two comparisons cut the other way, but not in a manner the story reckons with.
Chelsea Winter’s home was listed at $2.49 million and, after two price cuts, sold for just under $2 million — a result that argues against a premium, not for one, yet is folded into the same “fame doesn’t matter” quote without acknowledging the contradiction.
Jeremy Corbett’s home sold for $4.5 million against a $4.75 million rateable value — again below valuation, again presented as proof of the same flat conclusion.
Three data points, three different directions — one up on valuation, two down — stitched together into a single uncontested headline claim.
A dataset that disagrees with itself isn’t evidence for a flat “it doesn’t matter”. It’s evidence that nobody ran the comparison properly before publishing.
A very selective kind of curiosity
This isn’t the first time a curiosity premium has been reported into existence, or reported out of it, depending on what suited the story.
Fame for Sale documented how celebrity ownership was talked up as a selling point in listings for other well-known figures, then quietly downplayed once a vendor’s team wanted deniability ahead of a sale.
The pattern holds here: fame is a feature when it drives clicks on an open-home piece, and a non-factor when a masthead needs to pre-empt scrutiny of its own coverage the night before an auction.
The comparison nobody made
There is one gaping hole that nobody made.
A properly evidenced version of this story would have compared each celebrity sale against the median for its own street or suburb over the same period, checked days-on-market against comparable listings, and sought an independent valuer’s view rather than the vendor’s or purchaser’s agent.
None of that appears.
What appears instead is five quotes and three cherry-picked sales, stitched into a conclusion the numbers only partly support.
The question OneRoof didn’t ask
The more interesting story sat one click away and went unwritten: does OneRoof’s own saturation coverage of a celebrity listing — the open-home colour pieces, the estimate stories, the “what not to do at the viewing” listicles — itself inflate buyer interest and bidding on the very properties it then reports on?
That is a real conflict-of-interest question for a masthead that both covers and profits from residential property attention. It is also, unsurprisingly, not the question OneRoof chose to ask about itself.
What real evidence would look like
None of this means celebrity status always adds value, or that it never does.
It means the honest answer is “it depends, and here is the comparison that shows it” — not five interested agents and a headline built to land the night before a different masthead’s auction estimate is tested against reality.
Real evidence would show suburb medians against sale price, valuation gaps across a larger sample than three homes, and sources without a commission attached to the answer.
OneRoof had all of that data available and chose the anecdote instead.
Tonight the hammer will fall on Ardern’s Sandringham home, somewhere near a number 46 to 70 percent above the street average — and whatever it lands on, OneRoof’s own reporting already told us fame doesn’t enter into it.
Readers can decide for themselves which of the two stories to believe.
