Domain's Home Price Guide: How much is your property worth?

After launching the Home Price Guide in August, property website Domain.com.au has launched a new feature, Track My Home, which allows property owners to update the details of their property – including recent renovations, extensions and refreshes – to receive a current property value estimate. 

RateCity caught up with Damon Pezaro, Chief Product Officer at Domain, to chat about the Home Price Guide, the new Track My Home feature and the power of knowledge.

 How has the Home Price Guide changed the way properties are bought and sold in Australia?

Domain’s award winning Home Price Guide is a new way for every Australian home resident to find out valuable information about their home like how much it’s worth, whether they own or rent. It aims to empower Australians with information that has been hard to get previously, informing them about things like estimated value, the timeline of their property (including sale and rental history where available), sharing historical listing images and find out other important info like school zones, for any home in Australia.

Real estate agents will always play a key role in appraising your home and adding contextual information, with the Home Price Guide empowering Aussies with easy access to data and helps them make more informed decisions. Its latest feature, Track My Home, allows property owners to update the details of their home, to receive an updated property value estimate helping them to ensure they are making the right property decision at the right time.

What are the key features of the app that empower users?

Knowledge is power, and there are different features that will help different people based on their situation. For renters, Home Price Guide offers a rental history, meaning that tenants will now know how much their predecessors paid. For those that live in apartment complexes, the rental history feature means that tenants are also able to benchmark their rent against other apartments in the same building.

For buyers, Domain Home Price Guide provides an estimate of what the property is worth, its potential rental yield, the school catchment zone the property falls within as well as recent sale data for the property, giving any them the opportunity to be as informed as possible.

Potential sellers are able to use their property price estimate as well as research what similar properties nearby have sold for to help inform their price expectations.

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What research is behind the app estimates and how accurate are they?

Home Price Guide is powered by Australian Property Monitors, and the app currently calculates an estimated price based on a range of available data including the most recent sale date for the property and the available data on neighbouring property sales. Its newest feature, Track My Home, means owners can update the details of their property – including recent renovations, extensions and refreshes – to receive an updated property value estimate.

Home Price Guide transparently displays the confidence of each property estimate. Where we cannot confidently provide an estimate based upon key data points, we won’t show one.

How big of an impact do school catchment areas have on properties and has this impact changed over time?

We know that parents often need to factor in what school catchment zone their property falls into, as sometimes living on one side of the street to another can mean the difference between enrolling their children into their preferred school or not. By including school catchment zone information on all Domain listings as well as on Domain Home Price Guide, parents and caregivers can easily identify what school zones a property falls into, without having to waste time calling schools.

This year Domain released the inaugural School Zones Report, which tracked the price growth of properties in school catchment zone areas as opposed to suburbs, as is done traditionally. We found that the year on year growth in highly sought after school zones was sometimes as much as 50 per cent.

Home Price Guide is available by downloading or updating Domain’s iOS app in the Apple App store, or Android app in the Google Play store. It is available on the Domain website at: Domain.com.au/property-profile/.

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