Frequently asked questions

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 format by nswpropertysalesdata.com, a project built by James Elks. We're grateful for his work.

VIC: The Victorian Valuer General quarterly property sales reports, which publish suburb-level median prices and annual sales volumes.

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 quarterly report from Valuer-General Victoria. The current data covers the 12 months of 2025.

Market conditions change. Treat scores as a picture of historical supply patterns, not a guarantee of what's available right now.

NSW: Full coverage across 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: 780 suburbs with median price data and real annual sales volumes. Individual sale records and Street View are not available for VIC.

Queensland, WA, SA, Tasmania, ACT and NT are on the roadmap.

View live NSW data coverage stats →

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, 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.

GetReal is built on whatever data we can access for free. When more states open up, we'll add them immediately. If you think property data should be a public good, say so to your state MP or open data team. This is a solvable problem. NSW solved it. Read the full picture.

The score estimates how many properties matching all of your criteria (suburb, property type, budget, bedrooms, bathrooms, car spaces) actually sold in that suburb last year.

Each factor reduces the pool: your budget covers a certain percentile of the market, and bedrooms, bathrooms and car spaces each have a known distribution across property types. These are multiplied together, then scaled so that 25 or more matching sales per year equals 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 score bands:

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%) — This combination almost never appears in this suburb. Something needs to change.

Victoria publishes suburb-level median prices and annual sales counts, but not individual sale records or property attributes like bedrooms or bathrooms.

To estimate bedroom and bathroom availability in a VIC suburb, GetReal uses national distribution estimates derived from property market 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 individual records aren't available, the bedroom and bathroom factors for VIC are less precise than they are for NSW. 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 →

Victoria publishes suburb median prices and annual sales volumes for houses, apartments and land, but not individual sale records. So we can't directly measure what percentage of properties sell within any given budget in a VIC suburb the way we can in NSW.

Instead, we use NSW as a calibration dataset. NSW has over 146,000 individual sale records, which lets us measure the actual shape of property markets: for any given suburb median, what percentage of properties sell at 80% of that median? 90%? 110%? And so on.

We found that this shape, the distribution of sale prices around the median, is remarkably consistent across NSW with two meaningful variables:

Price bracket. More expensive markets behave slightly differently to affordable ones. We use five brackets: under $500k, $500k–$800k, $800k–$1.2M, $1.2M–$1.8M, and over $1.8M.

Market depth. Suburbs with fewer than 30 sales per year (thin markets) cluster more tightly around the median. We tested three tiers (deep, medium, thin) and found that high-volume and medium-volume suburbs were almost identical, so we simplified to two: active (30+ sales/year) and thin (under 30).

We tested whether inner-city suburbs behave differently to regional ones within the same price bracket. They don't, meaningfully. Depth matters more than location.

For each Victorian suburb, we look up its median price and annual sales volume from the Victorian Valuer General's quarterly data, match it to the right NSW-derived curve, and use that to estimate what percentage of the market falls within your budget. The score is that percentage. We're honest that it's an estimate based on comparable NSW markets, not a direct count of VIC sales.

The actual distribution tables used in this calculation are shown below. They are derived from NSW data and update automatically when new data is loaded.

A suburb appears in the dataset if it had at least 5 property sales recorded in the most recent data 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 and 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.