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If you want to avoid public housing hotspots in an area you can. I'll show you exactly how to find public housing hotspots so you can avoid them.

If you're looking at investing in a property, chances are you're going to want to know where the public housing is in that area. Homeowners often want to know where the public housing is, as they want to avoid that area and some investors actually seek out public housing for the potential higher yields that properties around the public housing areas can deliver them with the potential of positive cash flow. So in this episode, I'm going to show you exactly how to find public housing hotspots in an area using a tool that's absolutely free.

Hey, I'm Ryan from onproperty.com.au and the tool that we're going to be using to do this is called Microburbs and you can find that at microburbs.com.au. You used to be able to do this – you still probably can – through a tool called Ripehouse, but that's a paid tool that's going to cost you at least $200. You could do this free through the census. However, it was very difficult and technical to do. However, Microburbs have made it really easy and I'll show you how to do it now.

So, here we are on the homepage, microburbs.com.au. All you do is enter the area – the suburb that you're interested in looking at. Let's just choose one area of interest that I don't know a lot about, Tamworth, New South Wales. So let's go ahead and have a look.

Now, Microburbs shows you a lot of different things. There's a lot of information in here. If you want to see that they offer, go to onproperty.com.au/339 and I did a walkthrough with the creator of Microburbs and we went through absolutely everything. But for this purpose and finding public housing, we want to go to this affluency score section here. Go ahead and click on that, and we can see public housing here. So if we click on that, that's going to give us a heat map overlay of public housing in the area.

Now, I don't know anything about Tamworth, I've never been there. So, I don't know where the public housing is. But I can see from this heat map, straightaway, that in West Tamworth, 16% of West Tamworth is public housing and in South Tamworth, it's about 8%, whereas in Tuminda is 0%. Regular Tamworth is 0%. East Tamworth, 2%. Kingswood, 0%. Hillview, 1%. So, all around, it seems to be very low. But in these 2 areas, it seems to be quite high.

Now, the powerful thing about Microburbs is that we can actually break this down from just the suburbs, which we're looking at now, into smaller sections of the suburbs that they call microburbs. So when the census is done, they break it down into these different little areas of about 400 dwellings or 400 residences. So, if we zoom in, that's actually going to break those suburbs up into different micro sections or microburbs so we can see all the difference here.

Now, it was West Tamworth and South Tamworth that seem to have the highest percentage of public housing. But now that we've zoomed in, we can see a red spot here where public housing is 59%, above that it is 49%, 38%, 36%, we've got 15% there. So we can see a big pocket of public housing here in the Southwest of Tamworth and we can see a few here, 19%, 25% and 38% – another pocket there. So, even though when we've zoomed out, this was all red for West Tamworth.

Once we zoom in, we can see, actually, it's just the more Westerly side of things that have the high percentage of public housing. Actually, the East side of West Tamworth, if that makes sense, seems to be pretty good with public housing, 0%, 2%, 6%, that one's got 15%, 2%, 8%. So, a lot lower, but high percentages there.

Basically, you can pull around. We can see Oxley Vale here. Let's go ahead and zoom in on Oxley Vale. Okay. We can see that that's got a pocket of public housing at 54% in the far North of Oxley Vale. So, when we're zoomed out,