Hey everyone,
So I've been trying to shortlist suburbs for my next investment and honestly got sick of the usual stuff. Domain and REA show you listings but give you nothing to compare suburbs on. The "top suburbs" listicles on news sites are basically sponsored content. And pulling vacancy data from SQM, price history from CoreLogic, yield estimates from a spreadsheet, demographics from ABS... it's a full day of work just to form a view on one suburb.
Stumbled across this tool called PropIQ a few weeks ago. Not sure how well known it is here but thought I'd share since it's actually been useful.
What got me was it shows 16 years of vacancy data per suburb. So for Albany WA I could see the vacancy sitting at 0.34% right now, which sounds good on its own. But when you see the chart going back to 2009 and it's been trending down from 3% for basically a decade, it hits differently. That's not a blip. That's structural.
Also has a mean-reversion penalty baked into the growth score. So if a suburb spiked 30% YoY it actually scores it down because the data suggests that kind of growth tends to correct. Kind of refreshing compared to tools that just rank highest growth = best.
Covers 154 suburbs across the country scored on eight indicators. Vacancy, yield, capital growth, days on market, stock on market, population, demographics, affordability. All benchmarked against the state average not just in isolation.
There's a free unlock on one suburb to start, no card required. I tried it on Cranbourne East and it gave me 5 years of monthly rent data, the full score breakdown, and live listings ranked by how far below the suburb median they're priced. Ended up being actually useful for a conversation I had with my buyers agent.
Anyway just thought I'd share. Curious if anyone else here has used it or found better ways to research suburbs. Always keen to hear what workflows other people are using.
