What a property report is, and is not

A report tells you what the public registers say about an address on the day it was produced. It is a research tool, not advice, and there are specific things it cannot tell you. They are set out here rather than buried.

It is not advice

Nothing in a report is legal, planning, building, financial or insurance advice. It does not replace a section 10.7 planning certificate, a survey, a building or pest inspection, or a conveyancer. Where a report identifies something that matters, the right next step is usually to ask the council or a professional, and the report says which.

A clear result is not a guarantee

When a report says a hazard does not apply, it means the registers we hold do not place the land in a mapped hazard area. Registers are incomplete, they are dated, and a boundary drawn at council scale is not a survey of your lot. A property just outside a mapped line is not meaningfully different from one just inside it.

Where no register covers the land at all, the report says it is not established, and why, rather than treating it as clear. In 115 of 128 New South Wales councils, fewer than one address in ten is on land that has any flood planning map at all in the NSW Planning Portal’s layers. Only 9 councils have a map for the land under nine in ten addresses or more, and 4 more for between one and nine in ten (our count, October 2026), so across most of that state a flood search has nothing to search (© State of New South Wales (Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure), CC BY 4.0). Any report that returns "no flood risk found" there is describing its own ignorance.

It carries no valuation and no sale price

New South Wales sales data is licensed for non-commercial use only, so no sale price, price estimate or figure derived from one appears in this product. Where a report shows land value, that is the Valuer General's figure for the land alone, excluding the house and other structures, and it is labelled that way every time it appears. It is often well below what the property would sell for, and it is not what the property is worth.

It gives no insurance price

The report does not estimate what insurance will cost. It is not a premium, a quote, or a prediction of what you will be charged; we hold no pricing from any insurer, and we are not licensed to give insurance advice.

An insurer prices on construction, roof age, the sum insured, the excess you choose, your claims history and its own catastrophe modelling. None of that is visible to us. Two houses on one street with identical hazard mapping can be quoted hundreds of dollars apart, and the same house can be quoted very differently by two insurers on the same day.

It describes a point in time

Every field carries the date of the register it came from, and those dates vary widely. Queensland's statewide floodplain overlay is current to 2013. Victoria's flood overlays are gazetted and some were updated weeks ago. A report is accurate as at the dates it prints, not as at the day you read it.

Boundaries are indicative

Maps in a report are drawn from the cadastre, which is an administrative record of parcels. It is not a survey and does not determine a boundary. Only a registered surveyor can do that.

If something is wrong

Tell us at hello@wattleaddr.com.au. If we have misread a register we will fix it and reissue the report. If the register itself is wrong, the correction has to come from the authority that publishes it, and we will tell you which one and how to reach them.

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