Which property data tools are actually worth paying for?

Search for property data tools in Australia and you land in a genuinely confusing market:
one-off reports, monthly subscriptions, "free" suburb pages, and enough overlapping brand names
(CoreLogic, Cotality, RP Data, OnTheHouse) to make it unclear which of them are actually
different companies. This page maps the landscape honestly — what each tool actually gives you,
which of the "free" options are genuinely independent, and where Delora fits into that picture
(suburb-level, free, and openly not a replacement for a couple of these tools).

The paid tier: what you're actually buying

Cotality (the company formerly known as CoreLogic — same Australian operator, RP Data Pty
Ltd, rebranded in 2025) is the closest thing to an industry standard, used by banks, agents and
valuers. For an individual buyer, it sells a one-off Property Report for $43 (including GST)
or a cheaper Property Investment Report for $29.95, covering an estimated sale/rental value,
sale and listing history where available, comparable properties, and suburb-level context —
across roughly 98% of Australian properties. That per-property depth, at a per-property price,
is genuinely the point of it: you're paying for one specific address, not ongoing suburb research.

HtAG Analytics is a different kind of product — an ongoing suburb-level investment-analytics
subscription, not a one-off report. Current tiers run from $159/month (Starter) to $150 or
$250/month for the Investor and Professional tiers (both cheaper billed quarterly, at $450 and
$750 respectively) — the Professional tier is aimed at buyers agents and brokers, not individual
buyers. Worth being precise here: on a like-for-like monthly basis, HtAG isn't actually cheaper
than Cotality's report, as is sometimes assumed — it's a different tool for a different, ongoing
use case (tracking a portfolio or shortlisting suburbs over time), not a budget substitute for a
single property check.

Pricefinder, owned by Domain and built on Domain's own listing and valuation data, doesn't
publish consumer pricing at all — it requires signing up or contacting sales, and it's explicitly
positioned at real estate agents, mortgage brokers, finance professionals, developers and
valuers, with "investors and individuals" as one segment among several professional ones rather
than its core audience.

The "free" tier usually isn't independent

This is the part worth being clear-eyed about. OnTheHouse.com.au is free — but it's Cotality's
own consumer site (the site's own branding identifies it as "OTH by Cotality"), so it's the same
company's data through a different, ad-supported front door, not a second, independent opinion.
Domain and realestate.com.au are free to browse, but realestate.com.au's valuation estimates
run on PropTrack, which is owned by REA Group — realestate.com.au's own parent company — and
Domain's estimates run on its own model; both are supported by listing and lead-generation
revenue, not a research mission. None of the free options run a physical inspection, and none of
them publish a standardised accuracy figure for their estimates — see
why online property estimates never agree for what
that actually means in practice.

Common mistake: treating a "free" result as automatically independent. Free usually means
"funded by something else" — a data company's own funnel, or a portal's listing/lead business —
not "unaffiliated."

What's actually free and independent

Underneath all of the above sits the same raw material, published directly by government and
free for anyone to use — it's just scattered across separate agencies rather than
assembled anywhere:

• Planning rules and overlays — Victoria's own VicPlan tool
  generates a free planning property report for any address, listing every zone and overlay that
  actually applies (flood, bushfire, heritage and more).
• Demographics and socio-economics — the ABS Census publishes
  suburb-level population, income, household and dwelling data, free, for every suburb in
  Australia.
• Median sale prices — Victoria's own Valuer-General property sales statistics
  publish quarterly median prices by suburb and dwelling type, the same public dataset behind
  every suburb page on this site.

None of these are hard to find individually. What's missing, for most people, is the time to pull
them all together for a specific suburb before an inspection or an offer.

Where Delora fits — and where it doesn't

Delora exists specifically to assemble those free, public strands into one suburb-level view —
median house and unit prices, rent and gross yield, 1-year growth, planning overlays, schools,
transport and demographics, for every suburb it covers — for free, with a
published, honest accuracy track record rather than a
black-box estimate. That makes it a genuine alternative to browsing OnTheHouse or a portal's
suburb page for free suburb-level research.

It is not a substitute for Cotality's $43 report if what you actually need is one specific
property's sale history, title detail or a formal valuation before signing a contract — that's a
different, property-grain product, and this page isn't suggesting otherwise. It's also
Victoria-only for now (national coverage is planned, not yet built), and it doesn't run a physical
inspection any more than the free estimate tools do — see the same honesty standard applied to
Delora's own fair-value figure.

The number every one of these tools is really selling you

Strip away the interfaces and most of these products are delivering the same underlying artefact: an
automated valuation model estimate. It's worth being precise about what that is, because the
confidence a tool projects rarely matches the confidence the method supports.

An AVM is a computer-driven statistical model. It estimates a property's value from property
characteristics, comparable sales and market trends — and it does not include any physical or
visual inspection of the property by an appraiser. Nobody has walked through the house. The model
does not know the kitchen was never finished, that the north-facing living room is the reason the
last buyer paid over, or that the rear extension has no permit. It also does not know what the
inside of the comparable sales looked like, which is the same limitation compounded.

The confidence scores are a second trap. Each provider runs its own confidence-score system, and
those systems are not standardised across the industry — a "high confidence" badge from one
provider and a "high confidence" badge from another are not measuring the same thing, and there is
no common scale on which to compare them. Treat a confidence score as one vendor's internal
self-assessment, not an industry-comparable measure of accuracy.

How far apart can they get on the same house? In a CHOICE test on a single Sydney inner-west terrace
ahead of its April 2017 auction, online valuation tools produced a $560,000 spread between the
lowest and highest estimated price ranges, and a $355,000 difference between the tools' point
estimates. That's one property, one moment, and an older test — so don't read it as a current
accuracy benchmark for any named product. Read it as the shape of the problem: these are estimates
from models that disagree with each other, not readings from an instrument.

This also explains why the ownership question in the previous section matters more than it first
appears. PropTrack — which supplies the automated and digital valuation solutions used across REA
Group's platforms, including realestate.com.au — is owned and operated by ASX-listed REA Group Ltd.
It is a separate provider from Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) and from Domain's own valuation model.
So when two portals show you different numbers for the same house, you are frequently not seeing a
data error to be resolved; you are seeing two commercially distinct models, built by competitors,
disagreeing — which is exactly what independent models should be expected to do.

The practical upshot for choosing a tool: don't pay for a number. Pay for the inputs — the sales
evidence, the title and planning detail, the comparable set you can inspect and argue with. A figure
you can't interrogate is worth very little at auction, whoever generated it.

A simple way to choose

Frequently asked questions

Is CoreLogic and Cotality the same company?
Yes. CoreLogic rebranded to Cotality in 2025; the same Australian operating entity, RP Data Pty
Ltd, continues to run it under the new name.

Is OnTheHouse a genuine alternative to CoreLogic data?
No — it's Cotality's own free consumer site, built on the same underlying data. It's a useful
free front door, but not a second, independent source.

Do I need to pay for property data before making an offer?
It depends what you need. Free suburb-level research (Delora, or a portal's suburb pages) is
enough for narrowing down where to look. Before committing to a specific property, a paid report
or an independent valuation gives you property-specific detail — sale history, title, a stated
value — that free suburb-level tools genuinely don't provide.

Why doesn't Delora just show property-level data like CoreLogic does?
Property-level valuation is a different, heavier product with real accuracy and liability stakes
— Delora's own suburb-level model is deliberately scoped to what it can back up with a published,
checkable track record, not a per-property number it can't verify.

See also: why online property estimates never agree
· our fair-value model's public track record ·
title insurance: what it actually covers ·
how to research a location ·
how Delora sources and verifies its content

Delora provides general information, not financial or investment advice. Product names, features
and pricing for third-party tools change — confirm current details directly with each provider
before relying on them.