Daily Mail’s trillion dollar blunder
The problem with basing your business model on lifting stories from other websites is that you lift the errors too.
Which strikes Dr Mumbo may well be the reason that The Daily Mail Australia is currently making a rather bold claim – it suggests that house sales in Sydney’s suburb of Mosman were last year close to Australia’s entire gross domestic product.
The real number is ONE THOUSAND times smaller
The Daily Mail’s John Carney reports: “A trendy Sydney suburb on the city’s north Shore has grossed a trillion dollars in property sales over the last 12 months.” Or, to use the punctuation of the headline, “ONE TRILLION dollars”.
Which is interesting, given that Australia’s entire GDP is only estimated at about 1.5 trillion dollars. It suggests that the rest of the country really need to start doing their bit to contribute.
A closer examination of the Daily Mail’s story reveals a link to a story on Property Observer, which also uses the one trillion dollars line.
As Property Observer’s Prateek Chatterjee reports further down in the story, the actual number in question is based on data shared by Core Logic a fortnight before.
But the number is actually $1,047,292,200.
Which as fans of Silicon Valley will know, is only a billion dollars. You need three commas to be in the billion dollar club.
But you need four commas to join the trillion dollar club. And the hard working bankers of Mosman didn’t quite get there.
Given how much trouble journalists – Dr Mumbo included – often have with numbers, it’s not a surprising sort of mistake to make.
It’s even happened to Dr Evil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTmXHvGZiSY
But fair to say, the Daily Mail’s readers are not being charitable.
For the record, it will have been a long time since anyone described The Mail’s John Carney as a “spotty teenager”. An examination of his LinkedIn profile reveals that he’s a very experienced sports journalist. Not quite so much experience with high finance though.
And the hard working bankers of Mosman didn’t ‘quite quite’ there.
Ta Rob – typo sorted.
Tim- Mumbrella
Story of the week. Bravo.
I’m still confused with how the Spit Rd sale competes with “the best Brighton in Melbourne could muster”, considering Brighton ($5m) sold for nearly 4 times Spit Rd ($1.28m)?! Presumably he still thinks the Brighton house sold for $500k as per the first image caption…
And that huge error in the main premise of the article doesn’t even appear to have been lifted from Property Observer!
The rush to create a real estate headline with ‘a trillion dollar’ tag line just goes to show how out of all proportion and context property related stories have become. Across almost very publication, and on a daily ration there’s an apparent panic to keep constantly talking about real estate. Either a boom or bust or some form of record being broken apart. This stupid headline proves the point, a little more fact and a little less ‘fantasy’ would not go astray.
I grew up in Mosman.
My dad used to say you shouldn’t ask people where they live, because “if they live in Mosman they’ll tell you, and if they DON’T live in Mosman, WHY EMBARRASS THEM”
Apart from every single dwelling being worth a bazillion-squillion or more, if someone clambers up the property ladder to Mossie, they won’t be selling soon. They’ll be hanging on grimly or sitting back smugly. Especially the more expensive places.
Seriously, if you have a 4 to 6 million property, what is your next move? To another the same? To upgrade, it’s not like you can go up a couple of hundred thou, you really need to add quite a bit to get that better place.
What I’m saying is if you have a ppty worth $6m, you have to go to $8m to get an appreciable difference (closer to the water, better view, bigger garden, more bedrooms… that sort of thing).
And if you DO stump up for that eight million dollar property, you’d better have an extra five hundred thousand to give to the government.
So if Mosmanites sold a trillion dollars of property, the stamp duty would fund all government programs. And we’ll finally get those streets paved in gold Barry O’Farrell promised us.