A Vancouver real estate marketing company is apologizing after two employees posed as potential home buyers for a story that appeared on CTV News last week.
The women were filmed in a story that aired last Saturday about a spike in offshore Chinese home buyers around the Lunar New Year.
In it, two women claiming to be sisters can be seen walking with a salesperson around a showroom for Cressey Developments’ Maddox building, seemingly taking notes. They gave their names as Chris and Amanda Lee.
At one point, one of the women says her parents are visiting from China to help her and her sister buy a condo. “Usually Chinese people like to buy during this time,” she said.
Talk erupted online that one of the sisters was actually an employee of MAC Marketing Solutions, the company responsible for marketing the unit the women were supposedly looking at purchasing.
MAC president Cam McNeill later confirmed that both women filmed in the segment are in fact MAC employees – and aren’t even sisters.
“I don’t have a full explanation of how things went down, I deeply regret for the fact that it didn’t make it more clear to you that the two women in the story were MAC employees,” McNeill told CTV News.
McNeill declined to comment on whether the names the two women used are their real names to respect their privacy.
He said though he was out of town when the story was filmed, he takes full responsibility for the blunder.
“We’re trying to understand how this happened right now, and so I’m just trying my best to be open with you and just say that I’m very sorry that it happened,” he said.
McNeill maintained that the theme of the story – that Lower Mainland condo sites saw a spike in Chinese buyers around Lunar New Year – was completely true.
“I think that the ladies probably fit the profile of the story,” he said. “At the moment I don’t know whose idea that was; I don’t even know if they took it upon themselves to make that up.”
For more on this story, watch CTV News at Six.
