Realestate.com.au Suburb Profiles

Suburb Property info for Realestate.com.au, Australia’s largest property portal.

As part of an exclusive deal with RPData, REA had access to their property data. To that end, we created suburb profile pages, with almost 11,500 suburbs having information regarding buying and selling properties.

We created median price graphs, using FLOT, a JavaScript JQuery plotting tool. It's very customisable, and allows for awesome, interactive mapping of data. These were shown inside a custom JS tab block. FLOT by default wants JavaScript arrays jammed in page, which is fine, but for accessibility reasons we built a table reader into the initialisation that reads a table of the data, and builds a graph in a corresponding sibling element. FLOT out of the box allows for customisation of colours, and drops tooltips in for you.

To get the appropriate formatting of data (so the graph knows the difference between numerical and financial amounts), we had to create custom initialisations for the differing blocks by a mix of class names and our own DOM walker, that traverses the DOM finding named elements and adding the JS to them.

Median House Prices

Using a combination of our own stats and the stats platform we use (in regards to the number of users hitting the properties in that suburb), against the number of properties available in that suburb, we created our Supply & Demand graphs. These graphs were well received by our users as they could see, at a glance, how competitive the suburb in question is. Also attached to this block (by the tab block) is an interest rate graph.

This (although primarily an ad) shows Standard Variable Rate (from the major lenders) against the Reserve Bank of Australia Cash Rate, all in the custom colours of whomever had bought the rights to that block.

At the larger sites, it is often hard to create new advertising ideas (due to a desire to travel the safe, well-worn roads), but by using supported content we could find a happy medium; something users will use, and raise brand awareness at the same time.

In it's full glory, the page offers in-depth information on any given suburb. It has surpassed both usage expectations and ROI, and has made me a little proud to see it get out the door and into the wild.