Property data in Australia: who's sharing and who's hiding

GetReal started as a fairly simple idea: build something to help people work out whether their property search was actually realistic. Not based on vibes or hope, but on what properties actually sold for in that suburb. The name is pretty literal. The goal was to get it in front of Australian property searchers as a free tool. It would be properly live right now, except I ran into the data situation described below.

The full picture

Every time a property changes hands in Australia, the government registers the transfer and records the details. That data exists in every state. The question is who gets to see it. The answer depends entirely on which state you live in.

Australia has eight states and territories. One publishes its property sales data freely, for anyone, with no restrictions. The other seven lock it behind professional licences, sell it commercially, or don't publish it at all.

What NSW got right, and what's still missing

The NSW Valuer General has published bulk property sales data openly since the early 2000s. The data covers every residential and commercial property sale in the state, with over 140,000 records and growing, updated weekly, free to use under Creative Commons. That policy decision has enabled a generation of researchers, journalists, and tools, including this one, to do work that simply isn't possible in other states.

But the dataset still has a significant gap: it doesn't include bedrooms, bathrooms, or car spaces. These are the attributes every buyer puts into a property search first. It's not clear whether the government collects this information and doesn't release it, or whether it was never captured in the transfer process at all. Either way, the result is that even the best available government data falls short of what buyers actually need. NSW is doing more than anyone else. It could do more still.

What this means for GetReal

GetReal is built on NSW data because it's the only state where we can legally and freely access individual sale records. NSW users get real suburb comparables: actual addresses, actual prices, actual dates, matched to their search criteria.

For every other state, we rely on suburb-level median prices and sales volumes. That's useful, but it's not the same. A Victorian or Queenslander using GetReal gets a less precise picture than a NSW user. Not because their state's data doesn't exist, but because their government won't share it.

We'd like to change that. We're watching what each state publishes, and we'll use it the moment it becomes available.