PropertyXRay.com.au VS Code Effects

PropertyXRay.com.au's answer

Property X-Ray started from a personal build.

The land

After twelve years buying property, I bought a plot of land and went to build a house on it with a volume builder. The block had personality. It was bigger than the others in the estate, but with an awkward shape and a long unshared driveway. The challenge was making each attribute work for the design. We wanted pencil pines down the driveway to make it feel like a mansion approach, then specific landscaping to play to the shape.

From graph paper to 3D

Volume builder floor plans didn't fit. We spent a lot of evenings on graph paper, cutting shapes out and sliding them around the lot. Eventually we built a 3D model so we could see what the house would actually look like on the block, then added sun and shadow analysis to check orientation. That tool became interesting enough to consider shipping as a product, but we weren't sure who would buy it.

From a builder tool to a buyer tool

To find an audience, we widened the scope. We started building Property X-Ray as a consolidated data tool that surfaced everything we had been manually looking up before each purchase: transport, schools, flood overlays, crime, zoning. Two earlier near-misses sharpened the idea. One was a property where koala habitat reduced the usable yard, and the selling agent refused to disclose the impact. Another sat in a bushfire attack zone. The agent did not mention it until we found it ourselves on the council site. The data was always public. Government portals just made it impossibly hard to use.

So we put everything in one place with a better interface, and connected the 3D site simulation back to the data report. That single package is Property X-Ray.

PropertyXRay.com.au's answer

Backend

• Node.js for the API and data agents
• PostgreSQL with PostGIS for spatial queries (every property, zone, overlay, and parcel has a geometry column)
• Redis for caching
• Docker for containerisation

Frontend

• React with Vite
• Tailwind CSS

AI and intelligence

• Anthropic Claude API

PropertyXRay.com.au's answer

There is no single competitor that does what we do. Most overlap on one or two angles, then we differ on everything else. Four things set us apart:

• Buyer-side incentives. We report findings as signals, not verdicts.
• Aggregated open government data nobody else has stitched together.
• A 3D site simulation with sun and shadow analysis.
• AI vision that cross-checks what is built against what was approved.

1. Our incentives sit with you, the buyer.

Most property tools serve real estate agents or sellers. Their model rewards transactions, so the report tends to make the property look good. Property X-Ray is paid by the buyer. Our incentive is to surface what an agent has no obligation to volunteer, before contracts are signed.

We also report findings as signals, not deal breakers. Nothing in this world is perfect, and what stops one family from buying might be a non-issue for another. A koala habitat overlay might end the search for someone who wants a big back yard, and be irrelevant to someone planning a low-maintenance courtyard. We flag what we find as something to weigh, not a verdict. The judgment stays with you.

2. We aggregate open government data that nobody can find.

Queensland's open data is spread across dozens of council planning portals, state ArcGIS services, ABS census tables, QPS crime maps, ACARA school reports, and quarterly RTA bond data. Each one has its own login, format, search interface, and quirks. Most buyers do not have the patience or the GIS skills to stitch them together. We do that integration once, and surface it as a single property report. Nothing we publish is information you could not find yourself, given a few days per address. We just make it a few seconds.

3. The report includes a 3D site simulation, not just numbers.

For the same address, you can rotate the lot, drop a candidate house onto it, and run a sun and shadow analysis across the year. Knowing the block has a south-facing back yard, or that the neighbour's two-storey will throw shadow on your kitchen in winter, is the kind of thing buyers normally only discover after settlement.

4. AI vision cross-checks what is built against what was approved.

We pull Street View imagery and have Claude identify visible structures: pools, sheds, second dwellings, fences, additions. Then we cross-reference against the council's development application history. When something is visible on the property but has no matching approval record, we flag it for the buyer to ask about. This is the kind of issue that surfaces during a building inspection at best, and a future renovation refusal at worst.

PropertyXRay.com.au's answer

Property X-Ray is probably the first product in Queensland to aggregate all the open public data hidden behind fragmented government websites into one buyer-side report. That data lives across seven SEQ council portals, the QPS crime map, the Department of Education catchment finder, ABS census areas, QGSO population estimates, and a dozen other sources. We unify it to the specific lot, not the suburb average.

Two further differentiators:

• 3D site simulation with real terrain elevation. Not a flat 2D outline. You see the actual contour of the land before you commit.
• AI vision cross-checks built vs approved. Our pipeline scans Street View imagery for structures near the lot boundary and matches them against the council's development application records. If something appears in the imagery without a matching DA, we flag it for the buyer to investigate.

PropertyXRay.com.au's answer

Owner-occupier home buyers

The largest cohort. Families and first-home buyers shopping a shortlist of three to ten properties over several weekends. They care most about schools, flood, crime, noise, and what the neighbours can build next door. They do not have time to dig through council websites. They want the answer in plain English, with the data underneath if they want to verify it.

Property investors

Repeat users running due diligence across multiple suburbs at once. They care about rental yield, comparable sales, the development application pipeline, demographic shifts, and zoning. They use Property X-Ray to filter dozens of properties down to a few worth seeing in person.

Buyers agents and mortgage brokers

Professionals who need defensible research for their clients. Pulling the same data manually can take hours per property. Property X-Ray compresses that to minutes, and includes citations the client can verify.

Small builders and developers

Looking at vacant lots or sub-dividable blocks. They use the report to check zoning, height limits, setbacks, neighbouring development applications, environmental overlays, and what council has actually approved on adjacent lots.

What unites all four: nobody on this list is paid to make a property look better than it is. They all benefit when the report is honest, complete, and specific to the lot.