I've been doing some research into property prices and rents. Anyone, who's done this in the past knows how frustrating it can be to get any accurate sales data without subscribing to an expensive service.
Yesterday I came across this site. house.ksou.cn/
I've been addicted to it for the last two days. I did a traceroute on the site and it's hosted in China. Looks like it's some sort of scraper that collects and stores historic sales and rental data for all Australian suburbs. Don't know what the story is behind it but it seems that it may have been created to assist Chinese people investing in Australia.
The suburb profile link is also pretty handy, it links census data to suburbs and even allows you to even compare suburbs.
The next time anyone else is doing this, you can remember this post.
I found a couple of other sites that do slightly different things that are also free:
www.oldlistings.com.au/ similar to house.ksou.cn but not nearly as detailed.
suburbprice.com handy for looking at number of days on market and price reductions.
If I was to score myself a bargain, I'd be doing my research first and finding a property that seems good value and making an offer the first week or negotiating with the owner of a property that has been on the market for a long time, that may have some price reductions. I'm guessing that if a property has been on the market for a long time there may be something either wrong with it or may not have been marketed properly.
Another interesting feature of domain.com.au that I discovered recently is you can click on a real estate agent to see how much they have sold in the last 12 months.
e.g. www.domain.com.au/Public/AgentProfile.aspx?mode=sell&agencyID=17231&adid=2009775302
Adolph, I just did a quick search on my street (house.ksou.cn/ ) and a couple of houses that were bought/sold in the past 10 months aren't listed, so who knows how much else is unaccounted for.
Jeezus, some pretty sus looking tools. Researched my place and my folk's. I wish I could buy them now, they be way undervalued.
I had kept a spreadsheet of sales on my local area and this chinese link was very accurate. Even managed to have house prices for properties that did not disclose their price. Maybe there is some hacking going on?
I go to china several times per year and I am always getting asked about aussie real estate over there.
I'd be dubious about using a site based in China, for no other reason than there are plenty of local information sources.
Price disclosure is interesting. Basically a price is not disclosed if the seller does not want it to be (scared of money!) and/or if the selling agent convinces the seller not to disclose it (sold under estimate)
Either way, any real estate agent can get the price via their RPData subscription, so if you really want to know prices, buy your local real estate agent some beers... 
great find! I just checked 4 properties that ive been to the auctions for in the last few months and all are spot on. (including our house)
just having a read of property selling prices in the area we're looking in at the moment. very interesting considering one of the properties says it sold for almost 50k LESS than the reale state agent told me after I called up to inquire about the auction
