Researching locations
Find locations that fit your real life — not a generic suburb ranking.
Use your budget, property brief, travel needs and priorities to discover possible areas, understand their trade-offs, and build a shortlist you can verify yourself. Delora never names a "best suburb".
The eight-stage location-research framework
Each stage opens its own guide, in order.
Understanding location evidence
How to research a location
Broad area before suburb, suburb before street, street before property — why evidence gets more specific as you narrow in.
Build your location brief
Turn your commute, school and service requirements into a document you can use to shortlist suburbs.
Understanding median prices
What a suburb median actually tells you, how it's calculated, and why sales volume matters as much as the number itself.
Commute and transport
Scheduled versus actual travel time, stop points versus stations, and why peak-hour testing beats a straight-line distance.
Schools and school zones
Why a school being in the suburb doesn't mean your address is zoned for it — and how to check the one that matters.
Planning and development
Zones, overlays, amendments and the difference between a proposal, an approval and a completed project.
Environmental risks
Flood, bushfire and contaminated land are genuinely different risks with different official sources — not one score.
Demographics and community
What Census data describes about who lives somewhere now — and what it can't tell you about whether you'd fit.
Recorded crime
Why a council-wide rate isn't a street-level safety verdict, and what "recorded" crime does and doesn't capture.
Visiting and verifying a suburb
A structured field guide — what to check in person, and what only an exact address can confirm.
How to set a realistic location search area
Using budget and property type together to identify broad search corridors, before naming individual suburbs.
How to shortlist suburbs
Fast screening against hard exclusions to reduce hundreds of possible suburbs to five to ten real candidates.
How to compare suburbs consistently
A worked comparison framework distinguishing confirmed facts, estimates, observations and unknowns.
Researching a neighbourhood and street
Why suburb-level evidence hides real variation between pockets within the same suburb.
Sales volume and market depth
Why the number of underlying sales matters as much as the median price itself.
Is this price reasonable?
How to sanity-check a specific listing or sale price using real comparable sales and suburb context — the method professional valuers use, not a black-box number.
Rental demand, vacancy and yield
New-letting rental medians, gross vs. net yield, vacancy and competing rental supply.
Walking, cycling and car dependency
Why map distance doesn't equal real walkability, and the ongoing cost of car dependency.
Childcare, healthcare and family services
Why proximity on a map doesn't guarantee actual availability.
Housing supply and development pipeline
Why a headline pipeline figure can overstate genuine near-term supply.
Noise, flight paths and industrial activity
Road, rail, aircraft and industrial noise sources a single quiet visit can easily miss.
Council rates and services
Why rates are property-specific, and how council services genuinely differ across boundaries.
Owner-occupier vs. investor location priorities
Why the same location is assessed differently depending on why you're buying.
Regional versus metropolitan locations
Why a regional market is genuinely different, not just a cheaper metropolitan one.
Interstate and remote location research
State rules genuinely differ, and how to research a location you can't easily visit.
Working with a buyer's agent or property sourcing service
Licensing, how they're paid, the conflict-of-interest risk to watch for, and a public licence register for every state and territory.