Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Sydney House Prices

On Monday Housing NSW published the latest set of housing related statistics – median rents and median sale prices - for postcodes in the Greater Metropolitan Region as well as for Local Government Areas. The information value of this dataset can be greatly enhanced by presenting it on a thematic map. For example, mapping median values allows to highlight the distribution of costly and less expensive areas within the largest capital city in Australia. And the picture is quite interesting… Explore by clicking on coloured polygons!



Direct links:
Sydney Median Prices Jun'11 by Postcode
Sydney Median Rents Sep'11 by Postcode
YoY Change in Median Prices Jun'11

Although this dataset does not attract any media headlines, it can prove quite invaluable for those hunting for a house (to buy or to rent), or for research into housing affordability and alleged property prices exuberance. Its main limitation is timeliness since sales stats refer to June quarter (so, are at least 5 months old) but rental stats are as current as you can get (ie. cover the latest September quarter). The main advantage of this dataset is that, unlike widely publicised median prices that relate to entire cities, it contains information on what is happening within small neighbourhoods around the city. The only housing related information I am aware of that covers small neighbourhoods and is published on a map, is Property Investment Map from domain.com.au

The maps above are the result of a quick exercise in matching attribute data (ie. Housing NSW data distributed in non-spatial format) with spatial boundaries (ie. ABS Postal Areas, 2011 edition), and presenting it visually using Google’s Fusion Tables and Google Map API. And although I haven’t put much effort into defining ranges in a more scientific way, they give a pretty good picture of what is happening with rental and property prices around the city.

Related Posts:
Maps and property investment
WA housing affordability index

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

... it's a shame that they don't let tax payers use this taxpayer funded data.

they claim copyright with all rights reserved, so if you follow the governments own laws you can't publish your maps.

All Things Spatial said...

Thanks for bringing that up. Yes, it's an issue with many data published on the internet. On this occasion I am of the opinion that I am well within the rules:

"You are welcome to reproduce the material which appears at this site for personal, educational, in-house or non-commercial use, without formal permission or charge."

...but agree that their copyright statement is very ambigious hance possibly preventing many from putting the data to a good use.

Anonymous said...

I didn't see that part. That is better.

I would still like to see a CC-BY or CC0 stamp on it though. I don't know why these government departments are so slow on the implementation of CC licensing.

It takes less that half a minute of work for them to add the CC license, for the benefit of suddenly making the data useful for analysis and remixing into other presentation forms.

All Things Spatial said...

It is disappointing that the progress with releasing data under CC-BY is so slow, despite so many initiatives on Commonwealth as well as State agenda. Especially, considering that the "move" started in 2001 with the release of Spatial Data Access and Pricing Policy...