MORE BAYLEYS VERBAL ATROCITIES

My company has a valued relationship with Bayleys Commercial, going back to its roots in 1990. Indeed I paid a critical role in their establishment but that’s another highly amusing story.

Nevertheless, I delight in their verbal advertising outrages. The latest, in a full page New Zealand Herald advertorial, brags of its leasing role in a new rather ugly Auckland office building.

It reads, “The team worked closely with One NZ to find the company a highly productive office space”.

Plainly if the office space is highly productive One NZ won’t need any staff.

In fairness, this nonsense is an Auckland Bayleys specialty. It’s certainly not the case in their Wellington Bayleys Building (one of my company’s buildings) whose principal, Mark Hourigan, threatened to sack any agent who wrote such nonsense. This arose a couple of years back after I teased him on this Blog about his agents copying their Auckland office and referring to industrial buildings as “hard-working”.

In a sense this points up a clear cultural difference between the two cities. With Auckland, excessive exuberance is characteristic and a factor in its rapid growth. On the other hand Wellington’s more stoic plain factual approach reflects its major industry’, the Public Service’s influence, in which hard unvarnished factual statements are critical.