Suburb Stats — planning overlays, hazards, school zones and demographics on one map

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.

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.

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.

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 Overlay data is sourced from the Victorian Planning Provisions and may be out of date or imprecise at the parcel boundary, and a map layer cannot tell you about a covenant on the title, a Section 173 agreement, an unregistered easement or a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.

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.

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.

Pin the address, then work through five questions in order: the zone (shown for Queensland councils with an open service; VicPlan and the NSW Planning Portal are linked for the other two states), the overlays or constraints the risk alert lists for that point, the lot geometry — cadastre, easements and contours, with the draw-and-measure tools to test whether a 60 m² footprint fits — the infrastructure and neighbours (power lines, pipelines, public housing, school zones, landmarks), and the market layers (renter share, building approvals, bond-record rents, income). The development-potential page on this site walks through the method and cross-references the Victorian, NSW and Queensland code systems in one table.

Victoria: all 30 Victoria Planning Provisions map codes across the 29 overlay clauses (Heritage, Bushfire Management, Land Subject to Inundation, Special Building, Floodway, Public Acquisition, Environmental Audit, Design and Development, Vegetation Protection, Development Contributions and the rest). New South Wales: 20 constraint codes drawn from the LEP maps, SEPPs and state mapping — floodway, flood planning area, bush fire prone land, heritage item and conservation area, height of buildings, floor space ratio, land reservation acquisition, contaminated land, acid sulfate soils, Biodiversity Values Map, coastal vulnerability, mine subsidence, riparian land, ANEF contour, contributions plan and easements. Queensland: state layers everywhere — regulated vegetation A/B/C/R/X, PMAV, koala areas, erosion prone and storm tide, transport noise corridors 0–4, Urban Footprint, PDAs, fire ant zones, resource tenures — plus council scheme overlays where the council publishes an open service, including Brisbane Flood Awareness by source and the Traditional Building Character overlay. Each state has its own glossary page with a card per code.

Yes. 220 kV transmission lines, 66 kV sub-transmission lines and tower positions are separate toggles, so a major line can be told from a street feeder; petroleum and gas pipeline centrelines are shown for Victoria and NSW (Queensland has no open statewide centreline, so resource-tenure polygons stand in); easements come from the state cadastre and are the single most common reason a granny flat does not fit a backyard; contours come from state elevation data and show where a slope becomes a retaining-wall cost.

The red-flags filter restricts the overlay panel to the impact-band-1 and band-2 codes — acquisition, floodway, environmental audit, bushfire management, heritage, inundation and their NSW and Queensland equivalents — or inverts to hide them, which is the quickest way to see whether a suburb carries any deal-breaking control. The risk alert fires when you pin an address: it lists every overlay polygon intersecting that point, ranked by band, with one line on what each does. The banding is PremiumRea editorial judgement, stated as such on each state page; the schedule and the council decide the actual answer.

For Queensland councils with an open zoning service — Brisbane, Gold Coast, Moreton Bay, Sunshine Coast, Logan and Townsville — yes, normalised onto the Queensland Planning Provisions zone categories with the council wording and precinct kept. Victorian zoning is on VicPlan and NSW zoning on the NSW Planning Portal; both are linked from the map, and the overlay, constraint, cadastre, easement and hazard layers cover all three states.

Household income, East Asian heritage, South Asian heritage, Australian and UK born, bachelor's degree or higher, housing density, car commuters, renter proportion and median monthly mortgage repayment — all from the 2021 Census at SA1 level (blocks of roughly 200 to 800 people), not suburb averages. Crime rate at postcode or LGA level in Victoria, LGA in NSW and police division in Queensland. Rent distribution from the Census, government bond-record rents from the Queensland RTA and Victorian DFFH, and building approvals from the ABS and the Victorian Building Authority.

The purpose prompt that appears after you pin an address offers a first-home, investment or second-dwelling path, and the off-market link in the layers panel carries the strategy and the suburb you were looking at into the brief form. Twelve of the thirteen off-market briefs registered between 21 July and 3 September 2026 came from visitors who had been using this map immediately before — most of them for a first home or a second-dwelling site in eastern, south-eastern, bayside or inner-western Melbourne at $800,000 to $1.2 million.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.