Before you start searching by suburb or setting up listing alerts, there is a set of tools every first home buyer in Australia should work through, regardless of which state you are buying in. These are the ones that tell you what you can actually afford, what the land looks like, who lives in the area, and what any specific address has done before you call the agent.
None of them cost anything. All of them will change how you approach the search.
Best for: understanding your numbers before you fall in love with a property
The single most common mistake first home buyers make is starting with the property and working backward to the finance. You inspect a place you love, you get emotionally attached, and then you find out the borrowing capacity or the stamp duty blows out your budget. Moneysmart, run by ASIC, exists to help you avoid exactly that.
The mortgage repayment calculator lets you model what a given loan amount actually costs you each month at a range of interest rates. Plug in what you can comfortably repay and work backward to your maximum purchase price. The borrowing power calculator gives you a rough sense of what a lender is likely to offer based on your income and expenses. The stamp duty calculator covers every state and territory, and since stamp duty varies significantly by state, property type and whether you qualify for first home buyer concessions, this is the one to run before you set your budget.
None of these numbers replace a conversation with a mortgage broker. But they give you a grounded baseline before you walk into that conversation, and they stop you from burning weekends inspecting properties you could not actually afford.
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Visit: Moneysmart
Best for: zoning, overlays and high-resolution aerial imagery for any address in the country
Every state has its own planning portal, and every state's planning portal has its own interface, its own learning curve and its own quirks. If you are buying interstate, relocating, or simply want a consistent tool that works the same way regardless of where you are searching, Landchecker is the answer.
Landchecker covers all Australian states and territories and consolidates zoning, lot boundaries, planning overlays, sales history and aerial imagery in a single interface. The aerial imagery comes from Aerometrex, at a resolution six times sharper than standard satellite imagery and updated quarterly in metro areas. For a buyer trying to understand what is actually behind a property, what the roof looks like, whether there are any outbuildings, how the land sits and drains, and what the immediate surrounds look like beyond the listing photos, this is the quickest way to get that picture.
The overlay layer is where it earns its place for buyers who are serious. Toggle on flood risk, heritage, bushfire or vegetation management zones and you can see immediately which constraints apply to a specific lot. This is the kind of information that can surface during conveyancing and cause a buyer to walk away having already spent money on inspections and legal fees. Checking it early is free.
The state-specific planning portals covered in our individual state guides go deeper for their own jurisdictions. Landchecker's advantage is consistency and ease of use, particularly for buyers comparing properties across different areas.
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Visit: Landchecker
Best for: understanding who actually lives in a suburb before you visit
Before you fall in love with a suburb, spend five minutes understanding who actually lives there. The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes suburb-level Census data for free: income levels, age distribution, household size, languages spoken at home, employment types, and the split between renters and owner-occupiers. No signup required.
Go to abs.gov.au, search "QuickStats," and type in any suburb name.
For first home buyers, a few numbers are worth paying attention to. Median household income tells you something about the economic character of an area and what the retail strip, schools and services tend to look like. The renter-to-owner ratio is a useful proxy for how transient or settled the community is. Age distribution helps you understand whether you would be joining a suburb of young families, long-term residents, or new arrivals.
None of this tells you whether to buy. But it helps you understand what you are buying into, beyond the listing description's reference to "vibrant village feel."
A note on using AI to interpret this data: If you ask an AI tool to analyse ABS suburb data for you, be careful. The Census runs every five years, which means the underlying numbers can be significantly out of date in fast-changing areas. More importantly, AI tools tend to reflect back what you are already thinking. If you go in looking for reasons a suburb is a good investment, an AI reading the same data is more likely to find them. Use the raw numbers yourself, and be sceptical of any analysis that confirms exactly what you hoped to hear.
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Visit: ABS QuickStats
Best for: the full history of a specific address, including photos from past listing campaigns
Property.com.au describes itself as a "logbook" of over 15 million Australian properties. Type in any address and it pulls together the picture of that property from publicly available records: the year it was built, every recorded sale going back years, an estimated current value range, and something most buyers never think to look for: photos from past listing campaigns.
That last feature matters more than it sounds. When a vendor prepares a home for sale, the listing photos show you what they want you to see. A quick renovation, a freshly staged room, a garden at its best. Historical photos from previous campaigns can show you what the kitchen looked like before the cosmetic fix, or the bathroom the vendor is hoping you will not ask too many questions about. You are seeing the property's real history, not its best angle on a sunny Tuesday.
Beyond individual addresses, property.com.au layers in suburb-level demographics and overlays that flag things like flood risk zones. It is a useful final desktop research step before you inspect.
One thing worth understanding about sold prices on property.com.au: the availability and freshness of that data varies by state. In NSW it is sourced directly from the Valuer General, which publishes individual sold prices after settlement. In states like Victoria and Queensland, individual sold prices are not freely published by state governments, so property.com.au is often one of the only free tools available for looking up what a specific address last traded for.
A bit of background: Property.com.au is owned by REA Group, the same company behind realestate.com.au. It was built as a research companion to the main listing portal, and REA has steadily deepened its data over the years. The sold price data it publishes is sourced from each state's land titles authority, the same underlying datasets that conveyancers, valuers and property professionals access through paid commercial products.
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Visit: property.com.au
The federal government runs several schemes that apply to buyers in every state, and most first home buyers are not across all of them.
The Home Guarantee Scheme allows eligible first home buyers to purchase with as little as a 5% deposit without paying Lenders Mortgage Insurance, with the federal government guaranteeing the difference. From October 2025, there are no caps on the number of places available, and price caps were lifted significantly, to $1.5 million in Sydney and ACT, $1 million in Melbourne, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and Perth, and lower thresholds in other areas and regional locations.
The Help to Buy shared equity scheme allows eligible buyers to purchase with a smaller deposit and have the Commonwealth contribute up to 40% of the purchase price for a new home, or up to 30% for an existing home, reducing the loan size and repayments significantly.
On top of these federal schemes, every state and territory has its own first home owner grants and stamp duty concessions. The amounts and thresholds vary significantly. Check the guide for your state specifically.
Visit: Housing Australia: Home Guarantee Scheme
Visit: Moneysmart: First home buyers
Best for: understanding what the agent knows, and what they are not telling you
Everything above helps you research the property and the suburb from the outside. Homer helps you understand what is happening inside a sales campaign, and what the agent may not be volunteering.
Homer is available as a browser app, a Chrome extension, and on iOS/Android. The Chrome extension works on top of realestate.com.au and Domain as you browse. For every listing you look at, Homer surfaces the full campaign history: every price guide change, every time the property was relisted, every time the agent changed, and exactly how long it has been sitting on market, which is not always obvious from the listing date on the portal.
Homer also shows you the hidden auction guide. Agents set an internal guide on their listing that is not always displayed prominently to buyers browsing the portals. Homer surfaces that figure so you can see where the agent actually expects the property to trade, not just the number they have chosen to advertise.
Homer also tracks listings across more than a dozen property sites in Australia. You can shortlist any property you are tracking, including off-market ones, directly in the app. That means your entire search lives in one place: active listings, off-markets you have found through inspections or word of mouth, and the research you have built up on each one. A single source of truth for your search, rather than a browser full of open tabs.
It also gives you the selling agent's track record. How have they priced similar properties? How often does the guide move between campaign launch and sale day? What have buyers paid relative to the original ask? That context changes how you engage at every inspection and every negotiation.
All of the sold price and listing history that property.com.au shows you at the address level? Homer has that too, plus the campaign and agent intelligence layer that no public portal publishes. It is free to use.
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Visit: Homer
Start with Moneysmart before you start searching, so you know your numbers before you fall in love with anything. Use ABS QuickStats to understand the suburb you are targeting. Open Homer before every inspection so you know what the listing has done and who you are dealing with. Look up every address on property.com.au for the full sales and listing photo history. Then use Landchecker to check the zoning and overlays before you go any further.
Each state also has its own standout free tools that go deeper on local data. See our state-by-state guides for NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia.
