Free property tools for Australian buyers — what SA Property Central does and why it's free

Most Australian buyers spend $2,000–$5,000 on inspections, conveyancers, and Form 1 searches before they have any honest data about whether a property is even worth chasing. The agent's price guide says one thing. The bank's valuer says another. The neighbours say a third. By the time the truth shows up — at auction or settlement — the money's already spent.

SA Property Central exists to give you the data before you spend a cent. Every tool on the site pulls from the same official government sources that lawyers, valuers, and planners use. We don't add a markup. We don't gate it. We don't sell your data.

What's on the site right now

Nine free tools, all aimed at metro Adelaide property buyers (with national coverage planned). Each tool answers one expensive question:

1. Price Estimator — "Is the agent underquoting?" Compares the advertised guide against the real median for that suburb from the SA Valuer-General.
2. Live SA Market — "Which Adelaide suburbs are heating up or cooling down right now?" Year-on-year median change for every suburb, updated quarterly.
3. Zone & Subdivision Check — "What can I actually build on this block?" Enter any Adelaide address, get the planning zone, every overlay (heritage, flood, bushfire), and the locality-specific subdivision rules.
4. Form 1 Red-Flag Checker — "Is this Form 1 hiding something expensive?" Tick the items present in your Form 1, get a risk score with weighted severity.
5. All-In Cost Calculator — "What does this house really cost?" Real SA stamp duty, LTO fees, conveyancer, building inspection, mortgage repayments — every cent.
6. Mortgage Calculator — "What will my repayments actually be?" Weekly, fortnightly or monthly P&I with extra-repayment savings modelled period-by-period.
7. Borrowing Power — "How much will the bank actually lend me?" ATO 2024-25 tax + Medicare + HECS + HEM + APRA 3% serviceability buffer — the framework every Australian bank applies.
8. SA Land Tax — "What's my land tax liability?" RevenueSA general + trust brackets, with bracket-by-bracket breakdown. Investor-essential.
9. Settlement Calendar — "When's everything due?" Paste your contract date, get cooling-off, Form 1 deadline, finance and inspection windows, plus settlement — SA business-day and public-holiday aware.

Where every number comes from

This is the section most "property tools" don't have. Every figure on SA Property Central traces back to a named government department:

What you see	Source	How fresh
Suburb medians, sales counts	Office of the Valuer-General SA	Quarterly, fetched live
Year-on-year change	Office of the Valuer-General SA	Quarterly, fetched live
Address coordinates	OpenStreetMap Nominatim	Real-time
Planning zone	PlanSA Planning & Design Code	Yearly snapshot
Overlays (heritage, flood, bushfire)	PlanSA Planning & Design Code	Yearly snapshot
Subdivision rules (TNVs)	PlanSA Technical & Numeric Variations	Yearly snapshot
Stamp duty + first home buyer concession	RevenueSA	Manual update after each SA Budget
LTO fees	Lands Titles Office	Manual update yearly

No "industry estimates." No "proprietary algorithms." If a number isn't on a government website, it's not on ours.

Why it's free

Because the data is already free. SA Valuer-General publishes quarterly suburb medians on data.sa.gov.au as open data. PlanSA publishes the zone and overlay polygons as open GeoJSON. RevenueSA publishes the stamp duty brackets. The information you need to make a sane property decision is already out there — it's just buried in spreadsheets and PDFs most buyers can't navigate.

SA Property Central does one thing: makes it usable. No ads, no email capture, no upsells to agents.

How fresh is the data?

Live (fetched every time you load the page)

• Suburb medians and sale counts
• Year-on-year suburb price change
• Address geocoding

Yearly snapshot (re-downloaded once a year)

• Planning zones
• Overlays
• Locality subdivision rules (TNVs)

The yearly snapshot covers planning data because PlanSA publishes amendments every 2–3 months, but they're almost always minor (single-suburb tweaks). For house-buying decisions, an annual refresh is well within tolerance. If a major Code Amendment is announced, we refresh sooner.

What it can't tell you (yet)

We're committed to being honest about limits:

• Outside metro Adelaide — regional SA isn't covered yet. Murray Bridge, Victor Harbor, Mt Gambier, Whyalla, the Peninsulas — coming as we expand.
• Easements on the title — sewer mains, drainage easements, rights-of-way live on the property's Certificate of Title, not in PlanSA's open data. They're disclosed in the Form 1 — use our Form 1 Checker for that.
• Bank-grade valuations — our price estimate is the real median × transparent multipliers. Good for spotting underquoting, not a substitute for a registered valuer.

Who built this and why

SA Property Central is a solo project by an Adelaide-based product builder who got tired of watching family members lose $3,000+ in inspection fees on properties that ended up selling for $200k+ above the agent's guide. The tools on this site are built around buyer questions and powered entirely by official SA Government open data.

The bottom line

If you're buying a property in metro Adelaide, the nine tools on this site cover the decisions that cost the most when you get them wrong: is the price honest, what can I build, what does it really cost, what can the bank actually lend me, and what's hiding in the Form 1. All free, all from official sources, all in one place.

Start with the tool that matches the question you've got right now: