Bribery and construction

Spectator, The, May 31, 2003 by Norwood, Graham

It was when I was offered my second bribe in six months that I realised there was a dark side to my new line of work. After meeting a sidekick in a London bar, I finally met his boss who had a simple proposition: 'Perhaps L1,500 a month would help you keep the issue in the public's mind?'

This was not the world of drugs or petty crime into which I had unwittingly stepped and for which 15 years as a BBC staff journalist had ill-prepared me - but the genteel field of freelance property writing.

There has been an explosion of media interest in property. The Sunday Times, the weekend Telegraphs and the Observer, along with good old Country Life, have long had property pages, but until recently there was nothing else. Now the competition is everywhere: there are pull-out sections between the personal ads and the film reviews of Time Out, in the earnest Independent and in the picture-posed pages of Hello!. Even Heat, the must-read gossip magazine for celeb-lovers, is following suit. And with each new supplement comes a new opportunity for PRs to plug 'stunning' duplex apartments and 'unrivalled views' from country houses.

Property is big business. Despite a slight downturn in the market, almost every developer is reporting record profits, and just imagine the estate agents' commission on L1.6 million-worth of house sales in Britain each year. Little wonder that a few publicists step over the line to get a few extra column inches.

The returns from a 'good' story are high. Rick Marchand of the West Country estate agents Marchand Petit told me, 'Editorial sells houses. A broadsheet story and the right photograph, and the offers come in.' The results of 'bad' stories, on the other hand, can be disastrous. A senior executive of the housebuilder St James left his post to spend more time with his family after a string of bad reviews of an expensive Kensington development.

Which may go some way to explaining my first bribe, last autumn. A representative of a well-known estate agency said that a developer whose homes she sold would pay L500 if I wrote something 'helpful' in the Sunday Times or Sunday Telegraph (L500? Hardly Watergate or cash-for-questions, but she did name another freelance writer who had allegedly accepted a similar offer.)

Then there is the vexed subject of exclusivity. The nationals, slugging it out for readers and advertisers, want unique stories to show that they have the edge over rivals. PRs, on the other hand, want the widest possible coverage. This came to a head last year when the Daily Telegraph's Saturday property section temporarily boycotted estate agent FPD Savills after a row over this very issue.

And then there are those PRs who go one step further and just make things up. Last year a developer's publicist issued a press release about new-build homes in Bristol. They were located, she said, in an area of the city where a leading estate agent reported that house prices had risen by 50 per cent in each of the preceding two years.

I checked and, of course, the prices had risen by only a fraction of that amount. When I pointed this out to the developer's publicist, I was ticked off for trying to kill the story. The press release remained in circulation, and the misquoted estate agency simply shrugged its shoulders.

And while we're on the subject of house prices, a marketing executive for one well-known index that produces monthly figures about the state of the housing market admitted off the record that he once made up some local figures. As he put it to me, 'No one else recorded this data, so it couldn't be contradicted.'

It is sometimes said that property writers collude in corruption. I've been taken overseas; I attend my fair share of champagne receptions (a standard way to launch new property); and I may, from time to time, discuss the market over a lunch that has been paid for by an estate agent. But I have always given an honest assessment of the property that I am reviewing without worrying that I might offend my hosts.

Most writers hope that accepting freebies will not compromise what they write. But a direct payment or a free holiday for a partner may well overstep the line of acceptability.

Does this smack of sanctimony? I suppose so, but surely integrity is no less important in stories about bricks and mortar than it is in a piece about Iraq or the euro. In fact, when you consider that property plays such an important financial role in people's lives here in Britain, it might even be more important.