Suburb Stats — planning overlays, hazards, school zones and demographics on one map
A free, whole-of-state map that puts the layers a buyer normally has to assemble from six different government portals onto one screen: planning overlays lot by lot, flood and bushfire hazard, school catchments with NAPLAN results, ABS demographics, and land contours. Search any address or pan the map. No signup, no trial, no export limit.
What question this map settles
The question is not "is this a good suburb" — that is a question about you, not about the suburb. The question this map settles is narrower and far more useful early on: what constraints already sit on this land before anyone has an opinion about it. A block can be the right price in the right street and still be unbuildable for your strategy because a Heritage Overlay covers the rear, a drainage easement runs through the only spot a second dwelling fits, or a Public Acquisition Overlay has quietly reserved a strip for a future road.
Those constraints are all public information, and they are all published — just in six different places, in formats designed for planners rather than buyers. Vicmap serves cadastre and overlays. The ABS publishes census data by statistical area. ACARA publishes NAPLAN. State education departments publish catchment boundaries. Contours come from state elevation data. Putting them on one map at lot level is the entire product; nothing here is proprietary, and that is deliberate — a screen you can check beats a score you have to trust.
What is on the map
- Planning overlays, lot by lot. Heritage, flood and inundation, special building, bushfire management, vegetation protection, design and development, environmental significance, development contributions, public acquisition and more, sorted by their impact on what can be built.
- School catchments and results. Official published catchment boundaries with NAPLAN results attached, so you can see which side of a boundary an address falls on rather than inferring it from a listing description.
- Hazard layers. Flood and bushfire risk, plus land contours, because a slope that reads as "gently sloping" in a listing is a retaining-wall line item in a build quote.
- Demographics. ABS census measures including owner-occupier share and household composition, which matter more to a rooming-house or second-dwelling strategy than the headline median price does.
Data sources and limits
Cadastre, easements and planning overlays are from Vicmap, the state's authoritative digital cadastre. Demographics are ABS census. School results are ACARA NAPLAN; catchments are the official state-published boundaries. Contours derive from state elevation data. Where the map shows PremiumRea transaction context, it draws on our own record of 345 completed investment purchases settled January 2023 to September 2025, published open-access under CC-BY 4.0 with the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20095886.
Three of the map's layers are served as open JSON files you can fetch and check directly: crime-data.json — recorded offences by postcode and LGA, from Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (year ending December 2025), NSW BOCSAR, and Queensland Police Service open data (12 months to May 2026); building-permits-sa1.json — Victorian Building Authority permit activity 2022-2024 aggregated to ABS SA1 areas; and granny-roi.json — per-suburb granny flat return estimates built from Valuer-General Victoria Q2 2025 medians, Vicmap parcels and PremiumRea's 2026 build schedule. Each file carries its source and data period in a metadata block, so you can see exactly how current the layer you are reading is.
For general research only. Overlay data may be out of date or imprecise at a parcel boundary, and a map layer cannot show a title covenant, a Section 173 agreement, an unregistered easement or an amendment currently on exhibition. This is not a substitute for a Section 32 vendor statement, a planning certificate, legal advice or a professional building inspection, and PremiumRea makes no representation about the accuracy of any overlay shown or its effect on any particular property.
Frequently asked questions
What do planning overlays actually do to a property?
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An overlay is a layer of control sitting on top of the zone, and it changes what you can do rather than what the land is for. A Heritage Overlay can require a permit to demolish, extend or even repaint; a Land Subject to Inundation Overlay or Special Building Overlay brings floor-level and flood-engineering requirements; a Bushfire Management Overlay imposes construction standards and defendable space; a Public Acquisition Overlay means a public authority intends to buy some or all of the land. Whether any specific lot is affected, and how much it matters, depends on the individual property and on which part of it the overlay touches.
Which overlays should worry an investor most?
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The ones that remove development capacity rather than add cost. A Public Acquisition Overlay is the sharpest, because part of the land is earmarked for a road, rail or drainage project. Heritage constrains demolition and second dwellings. Inundation and Special Building overlays raise build cost and can rule out a slab-on-ground second dwelling entirely. Bushfire Management adds construction standards and defendable-space clearing that eat into the buildable backyard. Vegetation Protection can prevent removing the one tree standing where the second dwelling would go.
Where does the school data come from, and how current is it?
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School locations, catchment boundaries and NAPLAN results come from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority and the state education departments. Catchments are the official published zones, not an approximation drawn from addresses. NAPLAN results lag the current school year — they are published annually and the most recent full release is what you see — so a school that has changed materially in the last twelve months will not yet show it here.
Is this a substitute for a Section 32 or a planning certificate?
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No, and it must not be used as one. Overlay data is sourced from the Victorian Planning Provisions and may be out of date or imprecise at the parcel boundary, and a map layer cannot tell you about a covenant on the title, a Section 173 agreement, an unregistered easement or a planning amendment on exhibition. Use this to decide which suburbs and which lots are worth investigating; use a Section 32 vendor statement, a planning certificate and professional advice to decide whether to buy.
Is the tool free, and do I need an account?
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The map is free with no signup. It uses public Vicmap cadastre and planning-overlay data, ABS census data, ACARA NAPLAN school results, and PremiumRea's own record of 345 completed investment purchases, which is published open-access under CC-BY 4.0 with the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20095886 so you can check it rather than take our word for it. An account is only needed if you ask for a full due-diligence PDF report on a specific address, because the report is emailed to you.
What does the suburb median tell me, and what does it hide?
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A suburb median is a summary of a mixed population of dwellings, and it moves when the mix moves rather than when values move. A quarter with more three-bedroom houses transacting and fewer units will lift the "house median" without a single owner being better off. Read the median alongside the number of sales behind it, and treat a median computed on a handful of transactions as noise. That is why this map shows lot-level overlays and school catchments rather than leading with a single headline number.