Top 5 Free Property Research Tools

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Here is my list of the best 5 property/suburb research tools. If you are researching a suburb for property investing these tools are an absolute must.

Learn how to use these tools (and more) to find suburbs with a good chance of growth. Get the Advanced Suburb Research course today.

When you’re researching a suburb, it’s really important to have access to good tools to help you collect data and make sense of that data. So, today, I want to share with you the top 5 property or suburb research tools available for you and these are absolutely free.

Hey, I’m Ryan from onproperty.com.au, and this month, we’re talking all about suburb research to launch my new course on Advanced Suburb Research. If you want to learn how to research a suburb and you want  a checklist to follow so you can easily compare areas and choose the best area for you, go to onproperty.com.au/suburb.

Now, on to the 5 best free tools for researching suburbs. The first tool is called DSRdata.com.au. I just recently discovered this tool and it’s a very, very valuable tool. You’ll need to create an account but it’s absolutely free and you can login and you can search for the demand-supply ratio of a suburb. So this [inaudible 1:00] and analyses a bunch of different data to give you an indication of how much demand is there in a suburb compared to the supply of that suburb.

It’s a score out of 100, with 50 being a theoretical equilibrium between demand and supply – so, demand is the same as supply. Anything over 50 indicates demand is higher than supply and anything under 50 indicates supply is higher than demand, and therefore an area is either not likely to grow more than national average or may even decrease. So, it’s a very valuable tool to get that figure and to quickly understand an area. But this doesn’t have everything in there, it doesn’t have capital growth trends that you can bank on. And some of the data in there, I don’t necessarily trust – like days on market, for example. But, there’s a lot of great information in there. So, a very valuable tool, I recommend it to everyone.

The second most valuable tool when it comes to researching a suburb is onthehouse.com.au. This is a free tool out there and this is great when you’re looking at individual properties. It can give you so much information on individual properties. You can look at past sales history of that property. So you can see that this property sold 5 years ago for $425,000. Sometimes it shows you past listings or past rental listings of the property as well, but I don’t really rely on that. But also, they can give you comparable listings and comparable sales for an area.

So you can say, okay, this property’s listed at $600,000 what are similar properties in the area are listed for and what have similar properties on the area sold for? They also give you a rough valuation of a property that you’re looking at. So, I find it a very, very valuable tool when you’re down to looking at the property and understanding, should I buy this property? Is it over-valued? etc. So that’s onthehouse.com.au.

The third most valuable tool when doing property research is yourinvestmentpropertymag.com.au/top-suburbs. That’s a mouthful but this tool is great. You can go through and you can punch in your suburb and it’ll give you capital growth trends for the area. So, it’ll show how has this area performed over the last 10 years, last 12 months and last 3 months as well. And I do show you inside the Advanced Suburb Research course how you can use Your Investment Property Mag to get the data for 3 years as well, but there is an extra step to take that I just can’t be bothered elaborating in this video. But, yeah, Your Investment Property Mag has some really great data there in terms of median price as well. It goes through days on market and some of that sort of stuff.

The fourth free tool that I recommend is the Census Quick Stats page. To find this page, just simply go into Google and google “census quick stats 2011”, or if you’re watching this after 2016, google “census quick stats 2016”. This is a great tool to understand an area, population of an area, income of an area, education levels, some of the dwellings of the area, find out what percentage of people are renting in the area. So, this is a very valuable tool – Census Quick Stats. Again, that’s absolutely free.

And the fifth tool that I recommend is propertyvalue.com.au, which is by CoreLogic, who may know as RP Data. I don’t know if this is a new tool, I only just discovered it last week. But, this tool is cool, you can go in there, you put in a suburb and it gives you the basic details of a suburb – things like the median price, median rent, median rental yield of an area, I think they give you the last 12 months growth of the area, as well.

It’s pretty basic in what it offers. But in order to get access to that information, which is a really easy way to it, it’s a pretty clean interface and it makes sense. You can also drill down into the property level, but I haven’t done this and there is some sort of upgrade where you can get access to more data. But I didn’t see it as so valuable that I would pay for it. That’s propertyvalue.com.au, which is the fifth tool.

Some other notable mentions for free property tools that you can look into is WalkScore.com, to understand what sort of cafes and restaurants and things are within walking distance of an area. There’s Real Estate Investar, which is a paid search tool and property analysis tool.

It is quite expensive. I signed up for a 2-year contract, I think I paid $99 a month or if you sign up for just 1 month, it’s $250. But there is a 21-day free trial where you can use it. It’s got great search functionality to find properties and also has reports on suburbs as well. To get that 21-day free trial, go through my affiliate link at onproperty.com.au/rei for real estate investar, you can get access to that free trial.

Also, there’s a site called PriceFinder.com.au. Again, quite expensive, only if you’re a super serious investor would I look at this. There’s another one called RipeHouse.com.au, which does have useful information. But, again, it’s a paid tool and it’s quite expensive. So, only if you’re a really serious property investor would I recommend PriceFinder and RipeHouse and maybe Real Estate Investar as well. But Real Estate Investar, will probably be on the top of the list of those ones.

So, there you have some property research tools that I hope help you to go out and to find the data. And if you want help actually assessing that data and collecting the right data, not just collecting all the data of a suburb, you don’t want to get suburb overwhelm or data overwhelm, you want to understand just the right data that you need. You want to understand it so you can make a decision as to what’s the best suburb for you invest in.

So inside the Advanced Suburb Research course, I’ve got a one-page checklist with all the key data points on there and I’ve also got video tutorials to show you exactly how to collect that data using free online sources and then how to analyse that data. What do the figures mean? What do the trends mean? And how can I compare one area to another so I can really understand an area and feel confident to invest?

So if you want to check out the Advanced Suburb Research course and get access to that checklist, go to onproperty.com.au/suburb.

I’m Ryan McLean, and until next time, stay positive.