Buying & Selling
Buying Help via Apps: Comparison of Homer, Property Mate, Property Seeker, other?? or pay $$$ for RPData?
Hi All
I searched but did not find anything recent from real people on what they found useful when house-hunting.
As the title says, I am looking for input from any of you who have used these house-hunting tools and apps, to get more data than just standard realestatedotcomdotau and domain listings.
- Which ones are helpful if free? (I am the product.... ?)
- Which ones are worth paying for?
- What apps/extensions have I missed? (assuming linking to these is OK, make sure you are not affiliated with them and are a genuine user providing data for helpful review).
RP Data is "what the agents use" and I would love to see what they see. But it's so pricey.
Other apps - what is worth paying for? Do they overlap or did you need to subscribe to more than 1?
Also - actual app vs browser extension? What worked for you? Seems like extension is the way to go but I don't like that they "read all your data on all sites" or whatever their privacy disclaimer is.
Note: I consider myself fairly handy with computers and am fine building a custom extension to run locally here, and then pulling stuff into either a spreadsheet or a custom webapp running locally. I have been investigating the various extensions, but rather than having a good answer, I am just more confused. Plus, it seems many of them have propriatary data sources behind their paywalls. Is that just RPdata, and they are re-selling via their apps?
Seems like RPdata would be the way to go... but if a house hunt takes over 6 months that's really adding up a lot. Do any of the apps give you comparable info, at a better price?
Over the years here in this sub similar questions get asked,
My take is you really don’t need anything other than eg www.realestate.com, school catchment area maps and floodplain / fire risk maps.
It’s really not that hard to familiarise yourself with x school catchment area boundary, and to assess flood / fire risk areas.
People with an analytical mindset eg Engineers can get frustrated with non-perfect / non all in one systems, but all day everyday the existing systems work for people.
Absolutely it’s retrograde of eg Domain, RE to not have all relevant info eg school catchment areas auto-generated - they really should pull their fingers out about this.
We're looking in the suburb we live in already, so are familiar.
It's more that we want to see a) what places sold for without waiting the three months for "undisclosed" to change, and b) what the movement of prices is
yeah no. Many, MANY times an agent has quoted us a price only for it to a) drop 250k in price later and still be for sale, or b) have sold at a much lower price than we were quoted.
BUT if you offer then less at the outset, it's not like they come back to you, ever. Frustrating. I know it's not worth what they say, but they won't hear if from me. Then later it's magically THAT price, and sits there or sells to someone who is... not me? And the agent never contacted me even though they knew I was interested at THAT price.
honestly you can get most of what you're after free. REA and domain both show price history, and each state's valuer general publishes the actual sold prices, so RP Data's edge is mostly the estimates and agent comparables, not the raw data. You could also ask a buyers advocate what they use
I guess it's a case of not knowing what I don't know. I don't know what these apps have to offer unless I sign up and pay. :) Thanks for this feedback. I kind of agree, but these apps must get customers for a reason? I don't know.
Yes buy.
Price alerts could be a feature worth paying for, watching a property and getting a ping if price drops, rather than having to constantly and manually check a shortlist. Also "hidden" fields like what the price actually is, when listing says "ask agent" or gives a wide range. Not sure what else.
Rpdata doesn’t tell you anything more relevant to house hunting than the free sites. In fact sometimes is less data than them. Rpdata just has names of owners attached that’s why agents use it.
Thanks for this input
I wonder what the agents are using then, as they're getting daily updates of price movements, including for houses that are not with their specific agency
Very interested to follow this. I ended up building my own solution to track the houses in our area, give them scores based on amenities, location etc but if there's something else out there, it would be good to know.
I'm interested to know what kinds of things you want from a property hunting tool.
Do you mind describing what you built?
I was considering just building-on to a couple of existing (free) extensions to export data to a spreadsheet or something like that
An information dense dashboard with a map on one side and list of properties on the other. It pulls in public data sources from Vic govt (flood data, tree coverage, bushfire overlays, crime stats, school zones, road classifications, etc) as well as whatever other open data I could access (public transport timetables, mapping points of interest (eg. shops, parks, etc). I set the places that matter to me (a few workplaces) and what my commute limit is for each (by car, bike, walking or PT). I also pulled in different rates information from the councils I'm looking at so it can give me an estimate of what rates will be for the property (can be up to $1000pa difference just from one council to the next).
Then I'm scraping all the agencies in my area on a regular schedule. It pulls in any new listings that are found.
Based on my criteria it's able to score all the new properties, show detailed info about them and allow me to add the ones I'm interested to a watchlist where I can add my own judgements as well. I can then sort them by their open for inspection times and immediately see what I should go see on Saturday for example.
It's also keeping track of what the properties I've pulled in are selling for, so I'm starting to get a clear idea how close to the range they went for. Victoria has new laws requiring agents to publish their sale price within a week or so, which is rather helpful.
That does sound like an epic project. We launched dwello dot au and the main focus is helping property buyers spot and photograph issues during a walkthrough and summarising the findings in a report. We also added a user portal to manage the property journey, adding notes, preferences, etc. We do pull in some vicplan data. It doesn't sound as robust as your dashboard, but our users are loving it and we're always open to feedback on things to improve the property journey
Homer has stuff like “properties listed by this specific agent sell under/at/above price guide x/y/z percent of the time” which can be useful for the egregious ones
Price history, price changes are available on domain or property.com.au. Crucially, there isnt any info that can give you some sort of advantage in a private sale. You look at the property, do your building and pest and see what a property is worth to YOU and go from there. Comparable properties are really not comparable in reality.
I mean, I guess it's more being alerted to price changes then? Multiple times have had an agent quote a price then a few weeks later it's listed at $250k less. When that happens, would be nice for an auto alert to ping me
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u/Winter_Tiger_2615 3d ago
Over the years here in this sub similar questions get asked,
My take is you really don’t need anything other than eg www.realestate.com, school catchment area maps and floodplain / fire risk maps.
It’s really not that hard to familiarise yourself with x school catchment area boundary, and to assess flood / fire risk areas.
People with an analytical mindset eg Engineers can get frustrated with non-perfect / non all in one systems, but all day everyday the existing systems work for people.
Absolutely it’s retrograde of eg Domain, RE to not have all relevant info eg school catchment areas auto-generated - they really should pull their fingers out about this.