Data Sources

Now you know what is not important to look at when selecting a suburb to invest in - I hope that has opened your mind a bit. It is almost time to start looking at the specific data points you need to be analyzing to find the best suburbs to invest in, but before we do that we need to understand where we will be getting most of this data.

There are plenty of free resources out there to assist you in your property investing journey (I will highlight some more of these soon). However, the reality is if you are going to make an informed decision on where to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars you will need to a spend a few hundred dollars to purchase some reliable property data.

The main property analysis tools that buyer's agents and savvy investors use are as follows:

HtAG

Which platform is right for you?

So which platform should you use? Well that depends on your personal preference, they are all great choices in my opinion. Each of these platforms also have tutorials on YouTube and their websites to show you how to use them; however, you should first watch this comparison video from Under450k which gives an overview of the platforms.

What do I use? I like HtAG as it has almost everything you need so it make things as easy and as quick as possible for me, but I also really like the simplicity of DSR Data so I subscribe to that too (but I am a massive property nerd who looks at this stuff daily…). As you will see later on when we go through the data metrics you don't need to subscribe to multiple platforms, that’s just what I do.

I am in the process of testing out Suburbs Finder and DSR3 - really like these so far also, so all in all you can’t go too wrong with any of these in my opinion.

My verdict / recommendation

Gun to my head, what should you use as a newbie? HtAG - it is the most one-stop-shop of all the platforms and it is very user friendly. They have great training and they also have some pre-populated filtering / searches based on your goals which you can use as a starting point. If you get overwhelmed on this platform or find it too complicated, then you should pivot to DSR Data.

Don't take the methodology that Under450k uses in this video as gospel, but I think it is a great warm-up for the data factors we are going to go through soon and it gives a good insight into how HtAG works (the other data platforms are quite similar they just don't look as pretty…). Don't worry if this makes no sense just yet, it will once you finish this Step 4.

In my opinion, there is no way around using at least one of the above paid data platforms in order to make the best investment purchase. Don't treat this like some app in the AppStore where as soon as you need to pay for it you just give up - this is a very small investment in the grand scheme of your property purchase.

You also don't need to subscribe to these platforms for the whole year or multiple months - you can complete your data analysis within one month. Due to the illiquid nature of property (as we discussed in Step 1…) the trends in the data do not change very quickly, so if you identify a good suburb one month you can be fairly sure it will also be a good suburb for the next 2 months or so, meaning you don't need to re-pay for the platform if you are very tight on your budget.