This video gives a high level view of how to use ABS Quick Stats, a free resource from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to help research areas in Australia for potential property investments.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
So, another free resource that I use quite regularly when I’m trying to get an understanding of a particular suburb, I use the ABS, or Australian Bureau of Statistics, QuickStats. So to get to that, we go to abs.gov.au. In the search bar there, we just type in QuickStats, it’ll bring up some options, and then we’re looking at that one there. Okay so what we’re looking at here is summary information from the most recent census, so this is the 2016 census, the one before that was 2011, and before that, about 2006. So then we’ll just look at Surry Hills again, one we’ve looked at before for another video. We’re looking here at the suburb level, and then basically what this gives us is a really sort of easy to navigate, high level summary about the population of that particular suburb. So again you’ve just got the map over here, just showing you where it is in relation to the city, and just on the left here, this is sort of our summary information, so it’s giving you sort of a snapshot of how many people live there, their median age, and all these sort of things. That’s fine, I don’t tend to pay too much attention to any of this, I dig a little bit deeper. You can see some median income stuff here, but I tend to get my information from the more detailed tables below. So just to quickly get to the stuff that I think is most important from the QuickStats for each suburb you’re looking at, not so much around education or anything like that, the first thing I sort of look at is around employment. So if I’m looking at an area and I want it to be economically vibrant, I wanna get an idea of the unemployment rate, this is a good starting point. So using the ABS methodology here, it’s telling me that the unemployment rate at that time in this suburb was 4.6% versus New South Wales, average 6.3%, and Australia, 6.9%. It’s only a snapshot, things have moved on from then obviously, but it does give you an idea. If you go a little bit further down, you’ll see a bit more of a break up about the employment hours and stuff like that. It doesn’t interest me that much, this is a little more interesting, though. If I look at occupation, if you sort of total these two numbers up, we’re near sort of 60% of people living in the area, be them owners or tenants, renters, they’re sort of professionals and managers. Very white-collar, and that’s as expected basically, for a suburb like that, so close to town. Then going down a little bit more, this is where it gets a little more interesting to me, giving the median weekly income, again, as at 2016, and you can see those numbers are quite high in relation to national numbers there. Arguably more interesting though if you’re looking at it for an investment property and trying to work out who your tenants might be, is looking at this bit here, which is the travel to work and trying to get that understanding of who’s actually living in the area. If you look at this one, it’s not normal to see it this high, but around a third of people who are living there walk to work, it’s basically the CBD, so that kinda makes sense to me. Almost a fifth of people take trains and some other sort of public transport stuff in there as well, knowing Surry Hills has some light rail coming in now, so at the next census that would change potentially a little bit as well. But this is a really good thing if you don’t know too much about a suburb at the start, to quickly look into this stuff and get an idea of, how important is it for me to be near a station, or need bus routes, or do I need a car park or a garage or whatever it might be, so that’s some pretty important information there. The other stuff that I really like to get an idea of is around dwelling structure. If I just scroll down almost to the bottom here, you can see that, of the properties there at that time, separate houses, so standalone houses, were less than 1%. Semis, townhouses, and terraces and stuff were almost 30%, and around 70% there are flats and apartments. So when you’re looking at purchasing a property and trying to work out what sort of property you need to get within that suburb, it’s unlikely you’d be looking for a house. You’re really sort of looking to meet tenant demand and also find an area that will have lots of liquidity should you need to sell, so if it were me looking at these things, I’d be sort of looking at these two types of things. The next thing that I look at then, that’s probably about it really, on QuickStats, is the number of bedrooms. You can see some places where there’ll be very very few one-bedrooms. Again, given we looked up here and we sort of talked about flats and semis and stuff, flats particularly, then that’s why we have quite a lot of one-bedrooms in there, but it’s also telling me that four or more bedrooms are very very few, so if I’m looking at combining these two bits of information here, that flats and apartments are sort of 70%, and then within that, one-bedrooms or two-bedrooms dominate, and that makes complete sense, so look, ABS QuickStats is an awesome sort of tool to use and it teaches you quite a lot, some more useful than others, but it’s a great stepping off point and sort of gets you into some of the world of ABS, and from there you can dive a lot deeper, but certainly you can get up to speed on a suburb relatively quickly and it’s free information there, ABS QuickStats, so, hope that helps.
