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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