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

What GetReal can tell you depends entirely on what your state's government is willing to publish. There are three tiers.

Individual sale records available (NSW): Full experience. Real suburb comparables with actual addresses, prices, and dates matched to your search criteria. The score reflects what genuinely sold in that market.

Suburb-level data available (VIC, and others as they open up): Estimated score. We know the median price and annual sales volume for your suburb, and we use NSW market distribution curves to estimate where your budget sits. Useful, but not the same as real comparables. We say so clearly.

No public data: Nothing. We won't invent a score we can't support. If a state doesn't publish usable data, we'll say that too.

We're watching what each state publishes. The moment individual sale records become available anywhere, we'll use them.