Realestate.com.au property maps

While researching some strange results on domain.com.au thematic property maps I came across another new real estate map – this time from the leading Australian property portal realestate.com.au. It is a very sleek design and quite functional too.

The key attraction of this map is ability to filter information according to number of bedrooms (1,2,3, any), type of property (house or unit) and according to some predefined scenarios like: "long term growth", "incoming cash flow", "balanced" or "custom strategy". The last option activates two additional filters allowing users to specify desired capital growth over 5 years and rental yields (since these filters are linked care needs to be taken in interpreting the results!).

The map allows choosing between two thematic layers: "5 year growth rate" or "rental yields" (information is rendered according to applied filters). There is a legend with a key to different colours which is updated automatically as filters change. Individual polygons respond to mouse-over events - activating a display with summary statistics for the suburb as well as labelling the suburb with full name and postcode number. Click on the suburb polygon updates information in the table under the map.

Response from the server and drawing the polygons on the map can be quite slow at times (indicating a struggle of CartoDB and/ or Google infrastructure this application is built on) and there is no time reference for published information but overall, it is a very informative and well executed implementation.

Realestate.com.au is using RP Data information and similarly to APM, this source also indicates that median unit price in Darling Point, NSW has fallen in the last 5 years – however only by 10%, which is half of APM’s rate but still a negative result. All this despite city wide median price for units rising by more than 12% over the last year. That would imply that median price in Darling Point must have had a huge drop from 2010 peak if it is still 10-20% below 2008 price…

I will have to dig deeper into this issue since this case highlights serious limitation of using median prices to gauge movement in property price at a local level.

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Domain.com.au brings back property maps

Three years ago I wrote a post titled “Maps and property investment” where I outlined how maps can provide invaluable insights into the dynamics of the property market on a local scale. The maps I referenced were published by domain.com.au but unfortunately, they disappeared from the site shortly after. It was very unfortunate because these maps were the only property sales information presented in a spatial format at that time.

Unlike many other countries where property statistics are widely available, and hence can be presented easily on maps, Australia is lacking such information despite our property valuation exceeding $5 trillion. In other words, property owners and buyers in Australia are denied very important piece of information that would be very helpful in making purchase or sale decisions. But things are improving!

When I recently visited domain.com.au I was pleasantly surprised to find that maps are back on the site! Not in the original format but it is better than nothing at all. In particular, information is patchy but there are many suburbs with median prices for units and houses as well as capital growth rates for the past 12 months, and the last 3 and 5 years. The source of information is Australian Property Monitors (APM), an offshoot of Fairfax Media.

However, inconsistency between information presented on the maps and that published in tables on the same page is a bit disappointing. That is, maps still refer to December 2013 while tables contain more up to date February 2014 figures. Updating spatial information on Google infrastructure can be a pain which may explain the two getting out of sync.

I am also not sure about the methodology applied to create those thematic overlays and there are some strange results for several suburbs. For example, the median price for units in Darling Point has apparently fallen by almost 10% in 12 months to December 2013 and this suburb recorded “annual compound growth over last 5 years” of -4.3% (which means prices would now be 20% lower than in December 2008). Something does not add up…

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Route planning with a difference

Trip Risk is a route-planning map for Melbourne, Australia which displays the accident black spots along suggested routes. The crash markers are sized according to the total number of incidents at each location. A click on the crash marker reveals information on the number of crashes at a location and the total number of people involved in those crashes. A red dot signifies a crash that involved a fatality. The results displayed on the map can be filtered by speed and by accident type.

This application is a great example of innovation fostered by unrestricted access to data and free open source tools and services. In particular, historical crash data, dating from July 2007 to June 2012, were released under the Victorian Government Open Data initiative (unfortunately, equivalent information is not available for any other State).  The developers used Leaflet map for interactive display of information, MapQuest for route calculations, Nokia for geocoding accident locations, Mapbox for serving base map tiles and the crash data is stored and served by CartoDB.

It would be really neat if, in addition to all the detailed information about individual accidents, it would be possible to calculate a summary score – kind of a “danger index”, for a particular route to indicate how risky it is in comparison to some “average route”. Even better, if several alternatives with lower scores could be suggested as well.


First spotted on Google Maps Mania