Frequently asked questions
How the tool works, where the data comes from, and what the scores actually mean.
GetReal uses free, open-licence government property sales data:
NSW: The NSW Valuer General bulk Property Sales Information (PSI) — a complete record of every residential property sale in New South Wales. The raw data is processed and made available in a clean, easy-to-use format by nswpropertysalesdata.com, a project built by James Elks. We're grateful for his work.
VIC: The Valuer-General Victoria Property Sales Report — suburb-level median prices and sales counts.
Other states are coming soon.
NSW: Updated daily from the NSW Valuer General. The tool uses the last 13 months of sales, so results reflect recent market conditions.
VIC: Based on the most recently published annual report from Valuer-General Victoria, typically lagging by 6–12 months.
Market conditions change, so treat scores as indicative of historical supply patterns, not a guarantee of what's available right now.
NSW: Full coverage — 2,456 suburbs with real individual sales data from the last 13 months. Comparable property cards show real sold addresses with Google Street View photos.
VIC: 722 suburbs with aggregated median price data. Individual sales and Street View coming soon.
Queensland, WA, SA, Tasmania, ACT and NT are on the roadmap.
Property data belongs to Australians. Right now, most state governments disagree.
Every time a home changes hands in this country, the transaction is recorded by a government department, in a register funded by public money, under a legal obligation created by public law. The sale price, the address, the date — these are not private facts. They are public records.
And yet if you live in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, or most other states, and you want to know what properties have actually sold for in your suburb — not estimates, not agent-supplied figures, but the real numbers — you will be directed to a private data broker charging thousands of dollars. For the same information your taxes funded to collect.
This is not an accident. It is a choice. A choice that benefits a small commercial ecosystem at the direct expense of everyone else: first-home buyers trying to understand what they're really up against, renters trying to make sense of a market that keeps moving away from them, economists and journalists trying to report honestly on a housing crisis, community groups advocating for people being priced out.
NSW is the best we've got — which says something, but not everything. The NSW Valuer General publishes the record of every residential sale — address, price, date — updated daily, free to download, under an open licence. That's genuinely better than everywhere else, and it's the foundation GetReal's NSW data runs on. But the data doesn't include property attributes like bedrooms, bathrooms, or car spaces. Whether that's because the government doesn't collect it, doesn't require it at registration, or simply hasn't gotten there yet — we're not sure. And the format is raw bulk files, not a proper API: useful, but not exactly modern. The fact that a community developer had to build a separate project just to make it accessible tells you there's still room to go. NSW opened the door. It hasn't finished the job.
The score estimates how many properties matching all of your criteria — suburb, property type, budget, bedrooms, bathrooms, and car spaces — actually sold in that suburb last year.
Each factor reduces the pool: your budget covers a certain percentile of the market; bedrooms, bathrooms, and car spaces each have a known distribution across property types. These are multiplied together, then scaled so that 25+ matching sales per year = 100%.
The tighter any single factor, the lower the score. The factor bars show you which constraint is doing the most damage.
The grades map to bands of the score:
Highly Realistic (75–100%) — Strong supply. Plenty of properties matching your criteria sold last year. You should expect regular opportunities.
Realistic (55–74%) — Good supply. You'll need patience but shouldn't struggle to find options.
Competitive (35–54%) — Limited supply. Properties matching your full criteria are uncommon. You may need to act quickly or compromise on one factor.
Tight (15–34%) — Very limited supply. Consider relaxing at least one criteria.
Very Difficult (5–14%) — Rare supply. Your combined criteria eliminate almost everything on the market.
Unrealistic (0–4%) — The combination of criteria almost never appears in this suburb. Something needs to change.
The government sales data records the sale price and property type, but not the number of bedrooms or bathrooms. To account for this, GetReal uses national distribution estimates — for example, roughly 78% of houses have at least 3 bedrooms, 42% have at least 4.
These are averages across Australia and will vary by suburb, which is why the bedroom and bathroom factors are labelled indicative. A suburb like Mosman will skew larger; an inner-city apartment suburb will skew smaller.
The Victorian data published by Valuer-General Victoria is suburb-level aggregated data — it gives median prices and annual sales counts per suburb and property type, but does not include individual sale records or property attributes like bedrooms or bathrooms.
To estimate how many properties in a VIC suburb would match your bedroom and bathroom requirements, GetReal uses national distribution estimates based on ABS Census data. For example, approximately 78% of houses have 3 or more bedrooms, and about 42% have 4 or more. These figures are applied uniformly across VIC suburbs.
Because VIC individual sales records are not publicly available, the bedroom and bathroom factors for VIC are less precise than they would be with record-level data. The score is directionally useful — it tells you which factors are most constraining — but treat the exact percentages as indicative rather than precise.
See what data each state publishes and why individual records matter →
A suburb appears in the dataset if it had at least 5 property sales recorded in the most recent annual file. Very small suburbs, rural areas, or recently rezoned localities may fall below this threshold.
Also check the spelling — the tool matches on the exact suburb name as recorded by the government. Try nearby alternatives if your suburb doesn't appear.
The scores give you a directionally accurate picture of how constrained your search is — but they are not a precise count of available listings. They're based on past sales, not current stock, and the bedroom/bathroom distributions are national estimates rather than suburb-specific.
Use the tool to understand which factors are limiting your search and what changes would have the biggest impact — not as a prediction of exactly how many properties you'll find.
No. GetReal is an informational tool only. It does not account for your personal financial situation, borrowing capacity, legal obligations, or specific market conditions at any point in time.
Before making property decisions, speak with a licensed financial advisor, mortgage broker, or conveyancer.