SQM Research provides some amazing free data to help you understand various property markets, as discussed on this video.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Okay. Another quick little video here on a free resource that I use for property research. I use it certainly daily, if not multiple times per day. And that’s SQM Research. Which you’ll find at sqmresearch.com.au Within a property area, I guess these guys are most well known for their work on vacancy rates. They do a lot of work on equities research and managed funds and stuff like that. But certainly for this video we’re interested in properties. So, we’ll stick to that. As I said, they’re mostly known for their vacancy rates. But, if you use this website you’ll find out you can get access to a lot of other free information and it’s very helpful. Just to start navigating we click vacancy rates over here. It always defaults to postcode 2000, which is downtown Sydney. For this video I’m happy to keep it as that. The first thing you’ll notice is a 15 year graph there. And that, what that’s showing us is the vacancies and then the implied vacancy rate across that period. Alright, so it’s very much a high-level graph there and that’s for all property types. What you can do with this graph now, and they’ve had a major revamp in the website in recent times, probably about the last three to four weeks I think. And the usability is greatly enhanced. You can get a lot more information now. And one of the cool things, well I think it’s pretty cool, that you can do is you can just sort of highlight the area, just left-click the graph here and just go across for the bit that you need. And that’s going to reset the graph, right? So if you don’t want to look at 15 years, just go and do that. If you decide you don’t want to look at the vacancies, but you just want to look at the vacancy rates, just un-click that. And then you’re off to the races. It’s a lot cleaner, right? You reset that and you go back to the original graph. If you want to change post code, that little box there will get you on your way. You can also look at vacancies by region and city. That’s at a higher level and that’s an interesting thing to look at as well. For this we’ll just stick to the suburb. Probably one of the other thing I look at, I look at all of it, but the implied gross rental yield, alright? If we’re talking about postcode 2000, to be honest we’re probably mostly talking about units and not houses so much. It’s definitely the CBD. What I can do again, I sort of un-click a few things and then I’m just getting an idea about what the implied rental yield there for the two bedroom units is. It’s looking from all the way back from 2010. If I decide just to look at from January, 16th, for example. Just highlight that and then I’ve got a really good idea about how it has behaved within that time frame. You just hover over it, you can get all the raw data underneath. And that level of granularity’s really helpful. For people like myself, when we’re trying to research market to get a little bit information on it. If you click on the asking rent it’s a similar sort of thing. Again, you might just be in this case, interested in all the units, you un-click the rest of the stuff and you can sort of see over time that rents have sort of gone up to about $830 now. If you go all the way back there then $690. But it’s been a little bit chop and change, I guess. That’s some interesting information as well. And then one of the other things that is critical to look at is stock on market. Now stock on market, this one we’re looking at total. So what we can do to start with is to switch it to houses and units as I said, there’s not many houses in this area so really all the sort of information we’re looking at is going to just be units in this case, right? But if we did just want to look at houses to see how many, not many at all, okay? So we’ll flip back to that one. We come back to there and we get our aggregate view. Now this is really important, when we’re looking at stock on market and it’s just one measurement, but it’s one that I give a lot of importance to. By using information here at SQM, we can actually look at it and see over time what is, how many under 30 days, 30 to 60. And what we can also do, is if we just want to isolate it for, again just look at this, what we might call distressed listings, we can see that anything that’s over six months, 180 days, looks like it’s peaked in May 19 and its come down a little bit. So you could say that’s one kind of good sign for this area. It’s still too high for my liking, but at least using this information we can get a good idea about where it is. If we then decided to look at more recent, right? Under 30 days, that could be a sign of people coming to market and you can get an idea about where that sits in context. And again, to get a total, we just go back there and we can see quite a steep incline there in listings and then it dropped back down again. SQM provides some awesome information here. You can click in here to get some more back up information. There are some paid reports and stuff that you can certainly access. And in fact, I’d advise getting on to their mailing list as well. I think think from memory it comes out every Monday. And that’s some really good information as well. So look, that’s the free property side of the information at SQM Research. I hope that helps.
