There are some great free sites for researching property in Australia. You can find out everything from capital growth trends to the hipness of an area.
In recent years (and even months) a lot of great free sites have been made available to help Australian investors and homeowners do effective property research.
Here are my 8 favourite sites that I think you will absolutely love.
You can get almost everything you need for property research just from these 8 free websites.
Let me show you through them now.
1. Searching For Property – MyRealEstate.com.au
RealEstate.com.au and Domain.com.au are antiquated portals full of ads that get in the way of your property search.
When I do a simple search for properties in “Cronulla NSW” my adblocker blocks 17 ads on RealEstate.com.au and 26 ads on Domain.com.au.
Ads aside MyRealEstate.com.au is a better search tool for a number of reasons.
A) You can use natural language (think Google) – “2 bedroom unit in cronulla under $700k” (click to see the results in a new window). Other sites force you to enter criteria which is more annoying.
B) You can use search terms – I love searching for properties with the keywords “rented for” (click to see the results in a new window) to find out some yields of the area and even find positive cash flow properties.
C) All properties – MyRealEstate shows properties from all major real estate portals plus real estate agents websites. So every property is going to be on there.
2. Growth Trends – DSRData.com.au
DSR Data (stands for Demand to Supply Ratio) collects a lot of different data point to give you an idea of how much demand there is from properties compared to the supply of properties in an area.
High demand and low supply leads to a high DSR score and correlates to short-term growth of the area. Low demand and high supply give you a low DSR score and correlates to negative or stagnant growth of the area.
Sign up for a free account and you also get data or auction clearance rates, days on market, percent stock on market, percent renters in market, online search interest, average vendor discount, gross rental yield, vacancy rate and typical value.
3. Suburb Demographics – Microburbs.com.au
Microburbs is a great new tool that gives you immense amount of detail into the demographics of a suburb.
It will show you details and even heat maps of everything from public housing to crime rates to median income in the area.
This tool is an absolute must if you want to get an understand of what the area is like before investing into the area.
4. Previous Sales History + Comparable Properties – OnTheHouse.com.au
OnTheHouse is a great way to get a lot of the information found in a free property report.
It will give you an estimate of the value of the property, give you zoning details, land size as well as previous sales history for the property.
You can see exactly when the property was previously sold and for how much. Occasionally you can also see what the property was previously rented for.
It will also show you comparable properties in the area so you can compare the value/asking price of a property to similar properties in the area.
5. Historial Listings – OldListings.com.au
The major real estate portals don’t show when the property was listed. They want to hide this from you as they want to serve the best interests of the selling agents.
Often a property may stay on the market for a long period of time and have lots of price reductions. Looking at just the portals you will never know about this.
OldListings.com.au doesn’t have every property but it does have a lot, and will show you when the property was previously listed and how much it was listed for.
This is great for negotiating and understanding how long a property has actually been on the market.
6. Previous Rental Listings – House.Ksou.cn/rent.php
Ksou is a site primarily aimed at Chinese investors (thus the .cn) but it’s English version is a really helpful tool.
It has a lot of features but my favourite feature is the ability to find what properties have rented for recently. I personally used then when my rental agent wanted to increase my rent. I showed them what comparable properties were listing for and was able to negotiate the same rent for another 12 months.
7. Vacancy Rates – SQM Research
When investing in property you almost always want to invest in areas with a low vacancy rate. This indicates demand for the area and means your property is more likely to be rented (and thus generate an income for you).
SQM’s vacancy rate tool is 2nd to none. The data is really fresh (like 1 month old fresh) vs other sources (eg. Magazines) where the data is 6 months old.
Plus you can see the month by month trends for years! I think the data goes back to 2006 or something crazy like that. So if you want to know the vacancy rates of an area this tool is for you.
8. More Demographics – Census Quickstats
The Census is a survey that is done every 5 years and analyses a lot of things about the residents of an area.
Census Quickstats is a great tool that allows you to view that data.
You can see demographics of an area, income levels, how people commute to work, the types of dwellings in the area and much much more.
While Microburbs pulls a lot of the same data and in many cases displays it in a better way the Census Quickstats allows you to see more data and you can compare 2001, 2006, 2011 (and soon) 2016 data.