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 layers use the relevant state and council open sources: Vicmap in Victoria, NSW spatial and planning services, and QSpatial plus published Queensland council schemes. Demographics are ABS census. School results are ACARA data; catchments are official state-published boundaries where available. Contours derive from state elevation sources. 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.
Eight of the map's datasets are served as public 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 by police division (12 months to July 2026); building-permits-sa1.json — Victorian Building Authority permit activity 2022-2024, and ABS building approvals 2023-2025 for NSW and Queensland, aggregated to ABS SA1 areas; and granny-roi.json — per-suburb granny flat return estimates built from Valuer-General Victoria Q2 2025 medians, open parcel data and PremiumRea's 2026 build schedule; rents-qld.json / rents-vic.json — government bond-record rents from the Queensland RTA (June quarter 2026) and Victorian DFFH (year ending September 2025), with their different quarterly and moving-annual counting bases kept explicit; and land-supply-qld.json — official Queensland residential land-supply sites within 3 km, aggregated as published yield ranges rather than invented exact forecasts; and land-development-qld.json — QGSO March-quarter 2026 LGA stock of uncompleted residential lots in active approvals and, where published, approved but not yet constructed multiple dwellings. It remains labelled LGA context, and the 24 pages outside monitored LGAs are explicit unavailable values rather than zeroes; and pda-decisions-qld.json — rolling 3 September 2025 to 3 September 2026 verified approval/change decision counts from the EDQ decided register, mapped to pages by current lot/plan first and a deterministic locality fallback. It covers only EDQ acting as MEDQ delegate, excludes the seven council/authority-delegated PDA scopes listed by EDQ, and shows unresolved decision dates as incomplete rather than silently treating them as zero. The current register page has no explicit reuse licence located, so this file publishes aggregate facts only; the CC BY 4.0 2017 download is historical provenance and is not used for current counts. Each file carries its source, period and method so you can check what it does and does not claim.
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.
What does a Queensland transport noise corridor category mean?
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It is a mapped transport-noise category, not a measured decibel reading at the house. Outside Brisbane, Suburb Stats uses the Queensland Government mandatory and voluntary state-controlled-road corridor datasets; inside Brisbane, the richer Brisbane City Plan road, rail and local-road mapping takes precedence. Higher mapped categories can trigger more demanding acoustic construction provisions, but the applicable requirement depends on the building and approval pathway. Check the current QDC MP 4.4 and property-level mapping before design.
How is Brisbane flood likelihood different from an ordinary flood overlay?
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Brisbane Flood Awareness separates river, creek, overland-flow and storm-tide sources and publishes source-specific likelihood bands. River, creek and storm tide include very-low through high; the published overland-flow layer has low, medium and high only, so this map does not invent a very-low category. The January 1974, January 2011 and February 2022 extents are separate historic-event layers, not predictions; the 1974 source record is also marked superseded. Where an official lot-plan metric is available, the address panel reports it without replacing a current property flood report.
Do Brisbane character overlays mean a house cannot be demolished?
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Not automatically. Traditional Building Character, Dwelling House Character and Commercial Character Building mapping identify different assessment controls. Building age, the part mapped, exemptions and the current Brisbane City Plan all matter. The map keeps these codes separate and also names the applicable neighbourhood-plan precinct.
What are the Queensland state environmental triggers on the map?
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They include Koala Priority Area, Koala Habitat Area, core habitat, Vegetation Management essential habitat, Regulated Vegetation categories A, B, C, R and X, PMAV categories A, B, C, R and X, and wetland or wetland-trigger mapping. They are screening layers: they tell you what must be checked before clearing or siting work, not that every activity is prohibited or exempt. Koala exemptions are activity- and premises-specific under the Planning Regulation 2017 and must be checked against the Koala Conservation Plan 2020 and its current statutory settings. Regulated vegetation is governed by the Vegetation Management Act 1999. Its parent dataset explicitly licences the linked REST service under CC BY 4.0, and the MapServer item also states that the service is CC BY 4.0. PMAV source status and identifiers are displayed as published, including Part Replaced, without deciding their legal effect; obtain and check the current statutory property map before relying on any category.
Which Queensland coastal hazards are separated on the map?
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The state erosion-prone-area components, high storm-tide inundation and medium storm-tide inundation are separate layers. That distinction matters because erosion setbacks and storm-tide floor-level or access questions are not the same control. They are screening inputs for the State Planning Policy 2017 coastal-hazard framework; always check the current statutory instrument and coastal mapping at the lot boundary.
What does the EMP badge on a Queensland school mean?
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The Queensland Department of Education currently lists that state school as having an Enrolment Management Plan. It generally means enrolment demand is managed through a defined catchment and out-of-catchment places can be limited. The badge links to the school plan; the department list is checked annually because plans can change.
Are the rent figures asking rents from property listings?
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No. Queensland figures are RTA median rents for new bonds lodged in one quarter, by postcode; Victoria figures are DFFH moving-annual medians from bond records for official suburb/town areas. They are government tenancy evidence, not listing feeds, and their tenancy counts use different periods so Queensland and Victoria counts should not be compared directly.
What is the difference between Urban Footprint, PDA and SDA?
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Urban Footprint is ShapingSEQ regional-plan context; it is not a subdivision approval. A Priority Development Area has a state-led development scheme administered through Economic Development Queensland, while a State Development Area has separate state development controls. The map names the source category so it can be checked against the current instrument.
What does the recent PDA decision count include?
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It is a page-level verified minimum from the public EDQ decided register, counting each application once at its latest verified approval/change decision date in the displayed rolling 12-month window. Scope is only EDQ as MEDQ delegate and excludes the seven council/authority-delegated PDA scopes listed on the official applications page. Records with no verifiable decision date stay explicit and are never silently counted as zero or outside the window. No explicit reuse licence was located on the current register page, so only aggregate facts are republished; the CC BY 4.0 September 2017 download is historical provenance and is not used for current counts.
Is the future land-supply number an exact dwelling forecast?
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No. Queensland publishes each broadhectare site in a dwelling-yield band such as 101–500 or over 500. Suburb Stats sums the lower and upper bounds for sites intersecting 3 km around the suburb centre; when any site is over 500, only an honest minimum can be shown. The separate QGSO companion reports quarterly LGA-level stock of uncompleted residential lots in active approvals and, where published, approved but not yet constructed multiple dwellings. It is regional context, not a suburb count; timing bands and approvals are not delivery promises.
What do fire-ant zones and resource-authority layers tell a buyer?
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Fire-ant biosecurity zones flag current movement rules that can affect soil, turf, plants and landscaping materials; the live zone must be checked before works. ATP, mining-lease and petroleum-lease polygons show authority boundaries, not proof that activity occurs on a particular lot, so tenure status, holder and surface-access details still need property-specific review.