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Today I share a new tool that gives A LOT of information about a suburb so you can make more informed investment decisions.

Hey guys. For years, it's been really hard to find decent data on an area that you're looking at investing in. If you're interested in investing a particular area, if you don't live there, it can be very difficult to know things about that area that you want to know. Things like; even capital growth or crime rates or public housing in the area.

What the area is like? What kind of restaurants are in there? Over the last 6 months to 12 months, there's been a lot of tools that have been coming out that have made life a lot easier for us. And we have a new tool that I've actually just discovered yesterday called microburbs.com.au and I've got the creator and founder, Luke Metcalfe with me today to talk us through it and how we can use this to better help our investing.

Ryan: Hey, Luke, thanks for coming on today.

Luke: Hey. Thank you very much for having me, Ryan.

Ryan: Okay. So, talk the people through what exactly is Microburbs and why did you start it?

Luke: Yeah. Okay. So, Microburbs is a site, totally free site that gives you these detailed comprehensive reports for everywhere in Australia. Our goal is to provide all the information that you don't otherwise get in property ads and in a format that is really easy to digest. We break things down by all different kinds of qualities of a property like tranquility and hipness and lifestyle and convenience and provide scores of each of those. And then, break down the reasons why.

So, for example, under tranquility, we show what kind of land nuisance nearby. Is it near industrial? Is it near public housing? Under affluence, we provide the median price and you can see that on the map as well. The convenience will show you how far it is from train stations and from the city. So, all the kinds of stuff that you might to find out about a property. All these things that you – it's such an enormous checklist of things, often as negative things, as well. Like, you might be surprised when you move in that you're in a mobile black spot. So we can answer that for you as well. Or the internet isn't very fast. So, all these things, we put them into one report for you so that you can be assured that a property is right for you, whether you're an investor a home buyer.

Ryan: Okay. So the purpose of Microburbs is basically for anyone who's looking at investing in a particular area or if you're looking at a specific property, you can basically go to microburbs.com.au, you can put in the suburb or you can put in the property and it's going to give you a whole bunch of information on the demographics of the area, the restaurants and all the stuff. Basically, anything you would ever want to know and even things you wouldn't even think of about an area. I guess the goal is to make investors confident in their decision and know they're buying the right property, is that right?

Luke: That's right. Yes. Good point. We do areas as well. You can search of suburbs, local government areas, any level, we cover – post codes. Our big thing is that realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, they're great to tell you about the house. So, whether it's got a Smeg kitchen, how many bathrooms it has, but it's not telling you about the neighbourhood. Obviously, majority of the purchase is actually the land value. It's the land that cost money. And land is only worth something if it's near other things. If you all you cared about was the house, then go build a mansion out in the Nullarbor Plain and you'll save yourself a lot of money, right?

So, all these things about what kind of neighbors you're going to have, what risks that the property faces is really an information gap that we are filling. There's a large number of government sources out there. There's other private sources as well and we're a...