Does anyone know of an Australian website where you can get actual sale prices without paying through the nose?
In the UK there are several such sites:
http://www.nethouseprices.com/
http://www.ourproperty.co.uk/
http://www.mouseprice.com/
http://www.houseprices.co.uk/
…as well as the Sold Prices facility at http://www.rightmove.co.uk/All of these sites will let you search anywhere in the UK over any time period.
Here in Australia we have:
http://reareports.realestate.com.au/ $60 per suburb for 24 months of sales
http://www.homepriceguide.com.au/ $85 per postcode for 24 months
http://www.propertyvalue.com.au/ $40 per postcode for 12 monthsDoes anyone know of a subscription service or website available to non agents? Seems like the Poms get a much better deal than we do.
I’ve found the only place that offers useful free info is
It only covers the ACT however. But it provides fairly comprahensive info about each block including past sales data (for the past 10 years), land tax, rates, unimproved value, block plan, block size, nearby amenities and so on.
Great if you want to invest in the ACT, you can do half your due dilligence for free.
Certainly envious that there are such great websites for areas that I’m not interested in investing in!
One more Australian paying service is Residex http://www.residex.com.au , they have a range of reports (costing different amounts) rather than an online search function.
Does it seem odd to anyone that when making the biggest single financial transaction of a lifetime there is bugger all information available? I mean, when you buy shares you have full price history going back until when the company was listed on the stock exchange. Not so when you buy a house.
How many times have you asked an agent what price a house actually sold for, and s/he says: “sorry, I can’t tell you”. It happened to me just yesterday. Drives me nuts! Why the friggin’ hell can’t they tell you?
Alan Kohler wrote about this issue last year:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/05/1083635203804.htmlThat’s because neither he nor anyone else has a clue what’s really going on in the property market.According to the ABS, finance approvals in March were 19 per cent below the October peak, while flat against February. But it’s now a week into May. Building approvals have been flat, with two big spikes, for about three years and yesterday’s figures confirmed a slightly declining trend. But within that, house approvals were higher.
Meanwhile, actual credit growth remains at record levels and median house prices have not fallen, according to the data (at least three months old).
And then there were Sydney auction clearances last weekend – down to 32.8 per cent. But auctions represent only about 20 per cent of Sydney real estate sales: 80 per cent of the market is a complete mystery. Auction volumes are down, but that’s because there are more private sales. So Australian monetary policy is being set according to a hotch-potch of out-of-date and tangential data and quarter-truths about real estate. The biggest investment decision in most people’s lives is being made on the same basis.
How can the disgraceful state of information on the property market in Australia be allowed to continue? Because no one is responsible for fixing it and almost no one has a commercial incentive to do so.
There are, in fact, two projects under way to improve the state of information about real estate, one in Canberra and one in Victoria.
In Canberra, there is http://www.allhomes.com.au, a website which is both a property listing and data publishing vehicle. As well as houses for sale, it has a free data base containing all ACT sales since 1991, by address and with descriptions of the houses. It means someone thinking about buying a house in Canberra can find out all the sales of that particular property for the past 13 years, plus all sales in the same street or suburb.
It is a fantastic service, set up by a Sydney-based internet entrepreneur named Don Collis who was house-hunting in Sydney five years ago and couldn’t believe the appalling state of information available. He hired database expert Jan Mitchell and located the venture in Canberra because the city is a more manageable size than Sydney.
The only problem with Mitchell’s website is that the information comes from the Government, which means it is based on settlements rather than sales, and that means it is 30 to 90 days old. She does collect weekly sales data from agents (about 95 per cent of Canberra agents) but doesn’t publish it until it’s checked against the government data.
In Victoria, the Real Estate Institute, led by Enzo Raimondo, is going a step further.
The REIV now collects weekly sales data from about 700 of its 748 members, but this is not available to the public, and in any case another 2000 agents in Victoria selling houses are not institute members.
The REIV is setting up a call centre to ring all Victorian agents, not just members, every weekend to collect comprehensive sales data. In about a month, Raimondo says he will launch a public website providing fully up-to-date information on every real estate transaction in the state.
The only thing missing will be the house addresses because of legal advice that it would breach federal privacy laws. Perhaps Canberra’s allhomes.com.au doesn’t breach those laws because the information is published after settlement, when it is on the public register.
I rang most other real estate institutes around Australia yesterday to see if there was any interest in following suit. Queensland is watching Victoria closely and if it works, will do the same. WA collects data from the Government and provides it to members, but not the public. ACT is working with The Canberra Times to come up with a competitor to allhomes.com.au – apparently because Jan Mitchell refused to join the institute.
The Real Estate Institute of NSW collects no data from anywhere and has no plans whatsoever to do so. Australian Property Monitors and Residex collect it from the Government after settlement and sell it.
Originally posted by dmichie:
How many times have you asked an agent what price a house actually sold for, and s/he says: “sorry, I can’t tell you”. It happened to me just yesterday. Drives me nuts! Why the friggin’ hell can’t they tell you?Probably privacy. Or the fact that they really don’t know. I’m dealing with a real estate agent for a block of land, and she is the agent for the seller and buyer. Typical for a new estate
.I asked what price the vendor paid, and she wouldn’t tell me, quoting “Everyone deserves to make a profit, even you!”.
Bah.
I should duck down to the local DNR (http://dnr.qld.gov.au) to get some sales history… nudge nudge.
— MJ.
I asked what price the vendor paid, and she wouldn’t tell me, quoting “Everyone deserves to make a profit, even you!”.Yep, I suspect that’s the real reason. Agents don’t want to reveal prices if they are below expectations. We’ll see a lot of this as the agents try to prop up a falling market.
I’m sure they’d have no problems telling you the sale price if it was a “record sale” [biggrin]
If these other companies can gather the data from government, why not do it as well?
Or buy it from residex then publish it on your own site each week and sell advertising to real estate agents?
Hey, maybe I should keep this to myself and make some money…
As Dazzling said, go to the VGO or have a friendly REA who can give You RPData
Some sitesgive you one or two suburbs data for Free, Commbank has something also from memory..
“Money is a currency, like electricity and it requires momentum to make it Effective”
Count The Currency With This Online Positive Cashflow CalculatorIf these other companies can gather the data from government, why not do it as well?Even if you could easily gather the data from the titles office, the prices would be 2-3 months out of date. AFAIK the titles office doesn’t record prices until a few weeks after settlement.
What we really need is a regulatory authority (preferablly nationwide) that records prices when contracts are exchanged and makes the data freely available … kinda like a stockmarket.
Problem is, there are a lot of vested interests in keeping this property bubble afloat, and you can’t have the punters knowing the true value of real estate now can you!
As Dazzling said, go to the VGO or have a friendly REA who can give You RPDataWhenever I find an agent who’s desperate to sell (and they aren’t to hard to find these days) I ask for an RP Data report for all the streets around the property I’m interested in. The point is, I shouldn’t have to!
MJA, tell the Department of Fair Trading about this agent very quickly, secondly give me their phone number and i will set them straight.
Dimichie, good idea however u should know that the Share market and Property market work differently with this type of information in Australia … get a solicator to explain it to you.
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Dimichie, good idea however u should know that the Share market and Property market work differently with this type of information in Australia … get a solicator to explain it to you.Please do tell. Why is it recent sales data freely available in the UK, or Canberra for that matter, and not in the rest of the country? One could be forgiven for thinking its not in the interests of the real estate industry for the punters to know what houses are actually selling for (unless they’re selling for good prices of course [biggrin])
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