If you’ve scrolled Instagram or TikTok anywhere near Montclair this year, you’ve probably run into Ollie McAteer, even if you didn’t catch his name. He posts as the British guy living in New Jersey, has built an audience of 29,000 followers, and one of his reels about local real estate got specific enough that agents started sending it to clients. This week, he guest hosts an episode of The Montclair Pod. The town found out there’s a lot more to him than the accent.
Who Is the British Guy Living in New Jersey?
McAteer’s Instagram bio makes the pitch in a few words: a Brit in America, a New Jersey lover, partner at the advertising agency Mischief. On the podcast, he described his role there in plain terms. “I’m a PR person for an agency, so I help the people at my agency get on camera,” he said. That work has nothing to do with his New Jersey content. The persona grew out of a personal habit, not a job.
The episode landed in the middle of two big Montclair stories: a record breaking home sale and the messy fallout from the town’s muted World Cup response. McAteer, a Brit who has spent nearly a decade in the suburbs here, had his own take on both, one rooted in his own house hunt through New Jersey suburbs’ market, the other in his outsider’s eye on the World Cup. He joked on air that his hometown of Horsham, England, turned up harder for viewing parties than Montclair did. “I think we’re showing up for it more than the hosts,” he said.
Before New Jersey, There Was Horsham
That instinct for a good local story traces back to McAteer’s own start in journalism, long before he set foot in New Jersey. He grew up in Horsham, a small English town about 10 minutes from Gatwick Airport and roughly 45 minutes from both London and Brighton. He started at a local newspaper straight out of school and stayed five years before moving to London for a job at the Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail then sent him to New York. “They actually sent me out to America, and it was gonna be a three month stint. It turned into a year,” he said. He met his now wife, and to stay in the country he pivoted into marketing, a field he knew nothing about going in. When the pandemic hit, he left journalism for good and joined Mischief, which he described as a small startup at the time. “We were like six people behind a screen during the pandemic, and then it’s ballooned into like a 150 person advertising agency based out in Brooklyn,” he said.
That career shift explains how McAteer ended up in New Jersey. It doesn’t explain why he started filming it.
The New Year’s Resolution That Started It All
McAteer had lived in New Jersey for nearly a decade, first in Hoboken and Jersey City before settling in Maplewood, before he posted a single video about any of it. When Farnoosh asked him on air to explain his “love affair” with the state, he traced it back to a resolution.
“I came into this year thinking, how can I stop doom scrolling? And I figured for a New Year’s resolution I’d change my mindset. So every time I wanted to consume, I’d create instead,” he said. “What just came out very naturally and quite surprising to me was just a bunch of stuff about how much I love New Jersey, and there’s so many reasons why… I just think people that live here don’t understand how good it is compared to most other places. I moved to the suburbs here expecting greenery and a house, but what I actually got was the best loving tight-knit community I could ever hope for. The people are fantastic. The cuisine is incredible…. I’ve felt like I’ve been welcomed here so well over the past 10 years, so I guess a lot of this is just giving back thanks to the community that has been so good to me.”
His videos posted to Instagram and TikTok, move fast from one New Jersey moment to the next. One is captioned simply, a love letter to New Jersey, from a Brit. Another sends followers to Goldberg’s in Millburn, where he says some of the best bagels on the planet come out of a deli whose menu still has those oversized food illustrations. A World Cup post argues the tournament is letting fans from all over the world see something true about the country he has adopted: “The spirit of this America cannot be broken.” Ahead of the Fourth of July, he posted asking Americans for their plans this year, framing it with a wink at himself: “Asked by a Brit. (Yes I understand the dramatic irony.)”
“I used to love hearing people’s stories and talking to people who wouldn’t normally get the front page on the local paper. I just love the human interest side of things,” he told the news outlet Daily Voice.
That mix of affection and reach turned out to carry real weight. Farnoosh asked him directly on the Pod whether his videos had actually moved anyone, not just entertained them.
“Yes, one hundred percent,” he said. “I’ve got people in my direct messages on Instagram saying, hey, we have to move to America for my wife’s job or my husband’s job, and we need to figure out where we’re gonna live. We got the job in Manhattan, but we’re looking at New Jersey and we’ve been following you. And because of how you’ve explained New Jersey and Maplewood and the surrounding towns, we are now looking at homes, putting in bids on homes in Montclair, in Maplewood and South Orange. These are people as far away as Australia I’ve had. It’s crazy to the point where I’m thinking, should I just go into real estate?”
He was joking, but only partly. A guy who started posting to cut down on scrolling has become a genuine reference point for people relocating from overseas.
That optimism carries a political edge. McAteer said his British friends have been fed a narrative that now is not the time to visit America, that the country is too politically unstable. But he argues the wave of tourist videos coming out of the World Cup, English and Scottish fans in Boston, an Australian visitor posting from Miami, tells a different story. “The spirit of America is bigger than what you see in a five minute news segment back home,” he said. Mike pushed the point further, noting part of the issue is America’s reputation abroad of late versus the reality on the ground. McAteer said reshaping that gap, one video at a time, is part of what he’s trying to do. “I’m trying to do my small part in reframing how people feel about America in general, not just New Jersey,” he said. “It’s more than what you see in a five minute news segment back home. Here we have depth and color and optimism and passion.”
The Montclair House Hunt Nobody Knew About
McAteer’s own history with Montclair predates any of his content. His family looked seriously at the town before settling in Maplewood.
“We looked at South Orange, Maplewood, West Orange and Montclair. We were basically like, whichever house we can get first, we will,” he said. “This was the 10th house that we put a bid in on. I think we bid on about seven homes in Montclair. So Montclair was gonna be the place. Maplewood is the one that we could get in for not a crazy price.”
That experience gave him firsthand knowledge of the market long before he turned any of it into content. The video that actually put him on the Pod’s radar came later, and Farnoosh said as much on air. “You did this reel, Ollie, called Montclair Math, which is how I discovered you,” she said. In it, McAteer laid out a theory he says he heard directly from local agents: that Montclair homes are priced well under what they will ultimately sell for, on purpose. “I’ve been told by multiple real estate agents in this area that sell homes in Montclair and surrounding areas that the homes are engineered to be priced 40 percent under what they actually go for,” he said. He said the same pattern has started showing up in Maplewood, too.
Asked how Montclair and Maplewood compare now that he has lived through both searches, he didn’t hedge. “There’s more of a tighter knit community feel in Maplewood because it’s smaller,” he said. “Whereas Montclair, you may have that tight knit community feeling, but it feels a bit more sprawling. Montclair is just like Maplewood on crack, I guess. In a good way.”
He never got the house. What he got instead is an audience that trusts his read on New Jersey enough to act on it, whether that means picking a bakery in Maplewood or bidding on a home in Montclair. McAteer’s path runs from a local newsroom in Horsham to a following that acts on his word from as far away as Australia, one reel at a time.
Find McAteer at @olliemcateer on Instagram and TikTok, and check out more of the Pod’s own coverage of the market he keeps talking about.
