Data Sources & Attribution

Where my numbers come from

This page is an honest account of which fields on a suburb profile are genuinely sourced from a public dataset, and which are estimates or placeholders that I am in the process of either replacing with a verified source or labelling clearly. I would rather under-claim than overstate what I have. If you spot a stale link, a mislabelled figure, or an attribution I've missed, email support@equitysight.app and I'll fix it.

1. Australian Bureau of Statistics — 2021 Census of Population and Housing

• Used for: the usual-resident population figure on each suburb page, and the State Suburb (SAL) geography I build pages from.
• Source: abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data
• Geography layer: ABS ArcGIS FeatureServer (SAL 2021 boundaries), queried via the public REST endpoint at build time and cached in data/abs-suburbs.json.
• Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics © Commonwealth of Australia.
• Refreshed: The 2021 Census is the current release. I will ingest the 2026 Census once the ABS publishes the release files.

Population is the only ABS field I currently surface on a suburb page. I do not display ABS median household income, median rent, median mortgage, or dwelling-type percentages today — see section 3 for what those figures actually are and what I still need to do.

2. Australia Post postcode dataset

• Used for: the Postcode shown on every suburb page, matching suburb names to postal postcodes, and building state-level filters.
• Source: community-maintained postcode CSV (au_postcodes.csv) cross-referenced against the Australia Post postcode finder.
• Attribution: Australia Post is the authoritative issuer of postcodes. My dataset is a mechanical lookup only; I do not resell, redistribute, or claim ownership over postcode data.

Where a suburb has more than one postcode I display the primary one. A postcode may cover multiple suburbs — that is expected.

3. Figures that are estimates or placeholders (not yet sourced)

I want to be completely clear about this, because it matters: several numbers that appear (or have appeared) on suburb pages are not drawn from an authoritative dataset. They are placeholders generated by my build, and I am removing them or labelling them plainly until I can integrate a verified source.

• Median household income — currently a pseudo-random value seeded from the suburb name. It is not an ABS figure. Do not rely on it.
• Investment Score, transport score, amenity score — derived in part from the placeholder income figure and other estimates, so the score itself is indicative only, not a measured rating.
• School and park counts — population-ratio estimates (roughly one per several thousand residents), not counts from OpenStreetMap or any mapping database.
• Median weekly rent, monthly mortgage repayment, dwelling-type mix, distance to CBD — not currently shown on suburb pages. I would rather omit a field than publish a number I can't stand behind.

My plan is to either replace each of these with a properly attributed source or remove it. Until then, treat anything beyond population and postcode as illustrative, not authoritative. The methodology page explains how the indicative score is assembled.

4. Reserve Bank of Australia — cash-rate target

• Used for: the current cash rate that powers my calculator pages (Purchase Calculator, Mortgage Repayment, Loan Serviceability, Mortgage Stress Test) via the window.MarketRate module.
• Source: rba.gov.au/statistics/cash-rate
• Refreshed: read at page load via my market-rate module, which queries the RBA public feed.
• Attribution: Reserve Bank of Australia. Figures are used descriptively and are not represented as RBA forecasts.

The cash rate is a genuine, live figure. When you open a calculator that models repayments, the current RBA cash rate is used as the baseline for variable-rate scenarios, and I add a typical bank margin on top to estimate an effective borrowing rate.

5. My written calculator guides

The long-form guides attached to each calculator are drafted with AI assistance and then human-reviewed and edited by me for accuracy and Australian relevance. I mention this plainly because I think you should know how the words are made. The numbers and formulas inside the calculators are coded by hand and documented on the methodology page; the prose around them is AI-assisted and human-checked.

6. What I do NOT do

• No third-party listing or market-price data on suburb pages. The figures on a suburb page are not drawn from Domain, realestate.com.au, CoreLogic, PriceFinder, or any other listing feed. (My code includes an optional Domain integration, but no live listing or market-price data is currently displayed.)
• No sponsored content. No developer, agent, buyer's agent, or mortgage broker can pay me to feature a suburb, move its score, or change a verdict.
• No scraped listings. I do not scrape property listing websites.
• No personal data. I do not collect, store, or infer anything about individual homeowners or tenants.

7. Independence and conflicts of interest

EquitySight is run by a single solo operator. It is not owned by, licensed to, or commercially affiliated with any real-estate agency, developer, mortgage broker, buyer's agent, or data reseller. The site is supported by paid subscriptions, and may also carry contextual advertising. No advertiser has editorial access to a suburb page, and no advertiser can pay to influence a score, a strategy verdict, or a risk factor.

If this ever changes — for example if I accept investment from a party with an interest in specific suburbs — I will disclose it at the top of this page before the relationship begins.

8. Reporting a correction

I take accuracy seriously, and this page exists because I'd rather tell you what's solid and what isn't than pretend everything is verified. If any field on any page is wrong or misleading:

1. Email support@equitysight.app with the page URL and the field that's wrong (and, if you have it, the correct source reference).
2. I aim to respond within a few business days.
3. I'll fix confirmed issues and, where relevant, update this page.