Here’s what you need to know today

• Cyclone Alfred is expected to make landfall later than expected, with forecasts now for late Friday or early Saturday. With wind gusts of 125km an hour expected, governments and the SES have been using the extra time to do everything they can to prepare. (ABC News)
  
  

• As Queensland and Northern NSW prepares for Cyclone Alfred, Meta has come under fire for reportedly blocking searches about the tropical storm. The ABC has found that more than 300,000 accounts were posting about Cyclone Alfred but users that searched for that information were finding their searches coming up empty. (ABC News)
  
  

• Star Entertainment may have found its way out of its immediate financial woes. The casino giant has reportedly come to terms with Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Enterprises and Far East Consortium to sell its Brisbane casino. The sale will address Star’s short-term cash crunch, with the company warning it could run out of money as soon as this week. However, with $400 million in debt, the company still has a long way back. (AFR)
  
  

• Australia’s second-largest private hospital operator, Healthscope, is struggling under the weight of its $1.6 billion in debt. The hospital operator is owned by Canadian investment giant Brookfield and made headlines earlier this week after it failed to pay rent at 11 of its 38 hospitals. Now the company has appointed restructuring experts KordaMentha to prepare a contingency plan if it is placed into voluntary administration. (AFR)
  
  

• US President Trump has given the Big Three automakers a month-long reprieve from his new tariffs. Ford, GM and Stellantis have interconnected supply chains across the US, Canada and Mexico and would have been big losers from the tariffs. Trump would like these supply chains to be fully in the US. (CBS News)
  
  

• John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, has confirmed that America stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Western intelligence has been critical to help guide Ukrainian missiles over the 3 years since Russia’s invasion. (SMH)
  
  

• The US Supreme Court has denied President Trump’s bid to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign-aid. The 5-4 decision of the 9 Justices requires the Trump Administration to unfreeze payments for aid work that have been approved by Congress. The question is now: will the Administration comply? (CNN)
  
  

• A price war is kicking off amongst the GLP-1 weight-loss drug makers in the US. Last week Eli Lilly reduced the price of its Zepbound drug. Now, Novo Nordisk is cutting the monthly cost of Wegovy from $1,300 to $499 if Americans pay outside of their health insurance. (NBC News)

What the…?

Australia Post boss Paul Graham has shared a novel way that Australia Post workers are managing aggressive dogs when delivering mail. Citronella spray has emerged as the most effective defence against an overly-aggressive dog.

In the 6 months to November 2024, Australia Post managed 1,277 dog-related incidents averaging about 10 per day. Graham reported that this was a slight increase on the previous six months. (News.com.au)

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Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

The power of real estate portals globally

This is an excerpt from a conversation with Nick Cregan, cofounder of Fairlight Asset Management. (Listen on Apple | Spotify | YouTube)

Question: So what are some of your observations about these real estate portals globally? What characteristics make them so attractive?

Yeah, that's a really good question. The first observation here is that in the developed world, we can only find two examples where the number one property portal has ever been supplanted by the number two. So the equivalent of Domain overtaking REA on traffic and inventory numbers and becoming the number one property portal. 

The only two places where we've sort of seen that is in Russia, and I think we can put a swift line through Russia and the other spot is regional France, where there's a sort of horizontal marketplace that came in, but not in the major city. 

So these are widely considered, and I think quite rightly considered, to be almost like the old newspaper classifieds model. The classified pages in a newspaper were effectively a regional monopoly. These businesses have really stripped out the property section of the newspaper. So that would be the first observation about the market generally, it's a very attractive one around the world.

Question: How do you explain the phenomenon that in many markets these businesses become duopolies [like REA and Domain in Australia] but one becomes far larger than the other. Is it just really strong network effects for the dominant platform?

Yeah, one hundred percent. You can think of the consumer behaviour here where for 99% of people, your house is going to be your most valuable asset. If you go down to your local real estate agent and say, look, I'm looking to sell my house. And he says to you, well, we're not going to use realestate.com.au. And you say, well, you are fired. 

When selling your house you wouldn't use an agent who doesn't list on the main portal, as that's where all the buyers are. This creates a powerful virtual circle: more inventory attracts more eyeballs, which compounds over time. Nothing too revolutionary in that statement, but just a reminder of how powerful these network effects can be.

Remember, you can also watch Equity Mates episodes on YouTube. Check out our conversation with Nick Cregan as part of this episode here:

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