How To Know Almost Everyhing About A Suburb (Without Leaving Your House)

[youtube id="ZSYMMKou7ZI" align="left" mode="lazyload" maxwidth="500"] Today I share a new tool that gives A LOT of information about a suburb so you can make more informed investment decisions. Hey guys. For years, it's been really hard to find decent data on an area that you're looking at investing in. If you're interested in investing a particular area, if you don't live there, it can be very difficult to know things about that area that you want to know. Things like; even capital growth or crime rates or public housing in the area. What the area is like? What kind of restaurants are in there? Over the last 6 months to 12 months, there's been a lot of tools that have been coming out that have made life a lot easier for us. And we have a new tool that I've actually just discovered yesterday called microburbs.com.au and I've got the creator and founder, Luke Metcalfe with me today to talk us through it and how we can use this to better help our investing. Ryan: Hey, Luke, thanks for coming on today. Luke: Hey. Thank you very much for having me, Ryan. Ryan: Okay. So, talk the people through what exactly is Microburbs and why did you start it? Luke: Yeah. Okay. So, Microburbs is a site, totally free site that gives you these detailed comprehensive reports for everywhere in Australia. Our goal is to provide all the information that you don't otherwise get in property ads and in a format that is really easy to digest. We break things down by all different kinds of qualities of a property like tranquility and hipness and lifestyle and convenience and provide scores of each of those. And then, break down the reasons why. So, for example, under tranquility, we show what kind of land nuisance nearby. Is it near industrial? Is it near public housing? Under affluence, we provide the median price and you can see that on the map as well. The convenience will show you how far it is from train stations and from the city. So, all the kinds of stuff that you might to find out about a property. All these things that you – it's such an enormous checklist of things, often as negative things, as well. Like, you might be surprised when you move in that you're in a mobile black spot. So we can answer that for you as well. Or the internet isn't very fast. So, all these things, we put them into one report for you so that you can be assured that a property is right for you, whether you're an investor a home buyer. Ryan: Okay. So the purpose of Microburbs is basically for anyone who's looking at investing in a particular area or if you're looking at a specific property, you can basically go to microburbs.com.au, you can put in the suburb or you can put in the property and it's going to give you a whole bunch of information on the demographics of the area, the restaurants and all the stuff. Basically, anything you would ever want to know and even things you wouldn't even think of about an area. I guess the goal is to make investors confident in their decision and know they're buying the right property, is that right? Luke: That's right. Yes. Good point. We do areas as well. You can search of suburbs, local government areas, any level, we cover – post codes. Our big thing is that realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, they're great to tell you about the house. So, whether it's got a Smeg kitchen, how many bathrooms it has, but it's not telling you about the neighbourhood. Obviously, majority of the purchase is actually the land value. It's the land that cost money. And land is only worth something if it's near other things. If you all you cared about was the house, then go build a mansion out in the Nullarbor Plain and you'll save yourself a lot of money, right? So, all these things about what kind of neighbors you're going to have, what risks that the property faces is really an information gap that we are filling. There's a large number of government sources out there. There's other private sources as well and we're all about putting that all together in one place so that you don't have to spend ages looking at council pdf's and spreadsheets. We're bringing it together and we try and talk about properties in as concrete and conversational way as we possibly can so it's understable to ordinary people with a bit of knowledge about property. Ryan: Yup. We'll get into a screen share in a minute, guys, where we're going to go through this site. So, if you are listening to the podcast, I do encourage you to go to onproperty.com.au/339 to get access to this episode and watch through the video because we're about to go through that. But before we jump into that, I just want to ask you, of all things that you could be doing and you've started and sold successful companies in the past, what made you lean towards the real estate space and, of all things in the real estate space, helping buyers with area research? What made you go for that? Luke: Personal pain is the answer. My wife and I were looking for property. We did it for 18 months and I was making lots of spreadsheets and getting the price estimates from RP Data and looking at a whole lot of stuff. There was always that fear – maybe I'm a more type A personality, but I was aware that we could end up buying something that we'd be stuck with for a very long time and the way our tax system is designed to stamp duty [inaudible 5:19], they do try and lock you into a property for a while. Ryan: Yeah. Absolutely. Luke: So, to be able to get all of that in one place, it was just – we went to too many inspections. There were things that when we walked in the door that we realized straightaway, if I saw in my phone that there wasn't enough coverage or there's a particular layout that didn't fit with us, if we had found that straightaway or if we'd seen what the neighbours looked like. These things could have saved people a hell of a lot of time. So this is the site that I wanted when I was looking for a property and I'm happy to hear people often say that, I wish I had that 3 months ago when I was looking. Ryan: I think this is valuable because I speak to a lot of new investors, first time investors, and they do get really fearful and really overwhelmed. There's so much to know about an area when you're going to invest and it's really hard to get access to all that information. You got to go to so many different sites and you have to know what they are. I've been in this industry long enough that I know what most of them are, but even still, it's hard for me to say, okay, here's a property or here's a suburb. I've got to go 4, 5, 6, 7 different websites to get some of this information. For the everyday investor, it's going to be near impossible for them. There's so many people that are held back and say, I want to invest in this, but I don't know what the area is like. I don't know what the neighbours are like. I don't know so many different things. So, I think if we can get those people data in an easy to understand way, then I think it's going to be happy days for us. So, let's go ahead. Do you want to share your screen with us and talk us through the use cases that you think people will use the site for. I guess, I would like to look at let's say I'm interested in a particular area, what can we find out about that area? And then, probably go through, as well, let's say I'm looking at a property, what can I do to research about that property? So, maybe we'll do area first and then we'll go into property. Okay, so here we are at microburbs.com.au. So show us through how do we use this and how can we find information on a suburb? Luke: Sure. So, you land on the homepage and you get a big search box. So, you can type in any address in Australia. Here, we'll go for a suburb of Lindfield on the North Shore of Sydney. You can see here we give you the median land value. Now, that's not the price of houses, but what the government considers the price of the land alone and we see here how it grows over time and compare it to Sydney in general. Ryan: So that value of the land, is that like when people get their rates out from the government and you have to pay your taxes based on the value of your land? Is that what that information is? So it's not necessarily reflective of the market value of the land. It's more of what the government says it’s worth. Luke: They do look at the market value. So you can see how it's gone up a lot in the past couple of years. So the government kind of work out what is the market value of the land if you were selling just the land itself. Ryan: Yup. Okay. Luke: So, it does reflect. But, obviously, there are certain places where there are extensive buildings on top of it and knew they're worth a lot and then there are other places that are a knock down. So this is closer to what you would sell if it was a knock down in the sale. Ryan: Okay. Cool. So we got land value, so we can see trends there. Then what's the Investor Data? Luke: Okay. So here we have the floor space ratio. So that's very low. Here, you can only have for every square meter of land, you can only have 30 square centimetres of floor space, which means that it's a very low density area. Ryan: Okay. And is this determined by the council or what's this coming from? Luke: That's right. Ryan: Okay. Where is Lindfield in Sydney? I don't know Lindfield. I used to live in Sydney. Luke: Lindfield is in the North shore. So there's a train line that runs from the city. So that in a North, Northwesterly direction. Ryan: What's it near that I would know? What suburb? Luke: What's that? It's near Chatswood. Ryan: Okay. I know Chatswood. Chatswood Chase? Luke: Chatswood Chase. Yes. The shopping centre. Ryan: Yup. Okay. Cool. Alright. So minimum subdivision size is 790. Okay, that's pretty awesome. So if you want to invest in and are and you're looking at doing a subdivision, this is going to show you,