What Abora does for you

1. A different kind of property search

The first generation of property websites solved discovery. What is for sale, where, how much, with photographs. That was a real advance on newspaper classifieds, and it is now finished work — every portal carries broadly the same listings, presented broadly the same way.

What those sites were never built to do is answer the questions that actually decide a purchase. Can I extend at the back. What is running under the block. Is this priced like its neighbours or unlike them. Which of these six places is closest to the life I am trying to have. A listing is built to present a property, not to analyse it — there is no room on it for the easement or the comparison.

Abora is the research layer that sits after discovery. Same properties, different question — not what is available but what is actually true about this place. It reads the state property map, the planning scheme, the Census and recorded sales against one address, and shows you the answer with its working attached.

This was not practical for consumers until recently. It needs spatial databases holding millions of parcels, state governments publishing planning and cadastral data openly, and — for the last part — AI agents able to query all of it on demand rather than guess at it. Those three arrived at different times. The interesting work now is in putting them together.

Wherever you found the property, bring the address. The research layer is the part a listing was never going to carry, and it is the part that tells you what you are actually buying.

2. Start with what you have

There is one search box, and it works out what you meant. Paste an address and you get that property. Type a suburb and you get that suburb. Ask a question in plain words and it sends you somewhere sensible.

You do not need an account to start, and most of what follows is free. Where something needs a sign-in, we say so before you click, not after.

3. You have an address

You have found a listing and you want to know what you are actually looking at. Property X-Ray matches the address to its parcel, measures the block from the title geometry, and intersects it against the planning, easement and school-zone layers — surfacing the things a listing has no reason to mention:

• How big the block really is, and its shape, frontage and dimensions — from the title boundary, not the advertised figure.
• What sits on it that you cannot build over — easements, and how much land they take out of your usable area.
• Which planning overlays apply — flood, bushfire, heritage, vegetation — and what each one tends to mean for approval.
• Which way it faces, and where the sun lands across the day.
• How it compares to its neighbours on size, and what has sold nearby.

The one to look at first is easements. A buyer can talk themselves into a smaller block or a busier road. Finding out after settlement that a sewer easement runs through where the extension was going is a different kind of problem, and it is the single thing most often missed.

What it will not tell you: anything about the building. Condition, layout, light, what the street sounds like on a Friday night. That is still an inspection.

4. You have a suburb

You are deciding whether an area is worth your weekends. Suburb Insights covers more than 400 Victorian suburbs with who lives there, what they earn, what they own, how they get to work, what has sold, and which schools take enrolments from the area.

Each suburb also carries ratings for five kinds of household — families, professionals, first-home buyers, investors, retirees — with the Census figures behind each one. Those are a reading of the data rather than a calculation, and we explain exactly what they claim rather than leaving you to assume.

What it will not tell you: whether you will like living there. Census data describes who already does.

5. You have neither

This is the common case and the hardest one. You know the budget, roughly where you need to get to, and what matters — and not much else.

Discover takes that brief. You set a budget, the places you travel to regularly, and how much a handful of things matter to you. It then scores every listing that fits against those priorities and ranks them, showing you which part of your brief each property meets and which part it does not. The ranking is rebuilt around your priorities every time, so it is your brief being answered rather than a generic notion of a good house — the full method is published.

If you would rather describe it in words than set controls, Suburb Finder takes a sentence — “family-friendly, under $1.2M, half an hour to the city” — and turns it into a shortlist of suburbs.

6. Keeping up

Market Pulse covers the Australian market — rates, lending rules, first-home buyer schemes, stamp duty changes, supply. Every article lists its sources. It is national, unlike the property and suburb tools.

The calculators handle the arithmetic you will do repeatedly anyway: stamp duty, repayments, borrowing power, yield.

7. What it costs

Most of it is free to use without an account. Some tools need you to sign up, because they save state that has to belong to someone. A paid plan raises limits and adds report generation.

Here is every tool and what it needs — the same list the site navigation uses, so it cannot quietly disagree with what you find:

Market Pulse and the calculators are free and need no account. Full pricing is on the pricing page.

8. Scope and limitations

The judgement is yours. Abora sets out what the data shows and what it constrains; it does not rate a property as a good or bad buy. A match score answers your brief, not the question of whether to proceed.

We do not give financial, legal or planning advice, and we are not licensed valuers. On anything that decides a purchase, verify with the council, a conveyancer, or a licensed valuer. See our terms.

We show our workings. Every figure carries its source and date, and methodology lists every dataset behind the site. If something looks wrong, tell us — a wrong number is a bug we can find.