What do you know about property portal house.ksou?

A number of property industry members have told us about this data scraping website house.ksou.cn, yet it seems very few know where it has come from.

Offering sold prices for free in an easily accessible Google-style way, house.ksou also offers a ‘School’ function that allows you to search schools and gives you information as to the type of school, how it performs and other details.

The portal has been the source of discussion on property forums for some time, particularly in regards to whether the data is accurate.

This unusual property portal has seen much speculation as to its ownership in recent days and as to where the data comes from, so use it as a starting point and not as your only research hub. It hosts some Google Adsense advertisements.

It also doesn’t cover every area in Australia, with best coverage in Victoria and New South Wales.

Auction results, profiles of suburbs and new home information are also listed and it provides the option to subscribe to sold results through an email sendout.

The URL is registered to a Beijing address, unsurprising given the .cn extension, and appears to have been registered on 6 June, 2005.

The profiles of suburbs clearly explain that the site is geared towards Chinese buyers. When you click into ‘suburb profile’ and look at who is born overseas, ‘Chinese suburb’ is at the top of the list. This shows you popular suburbs for Chinese buyers.

Millers Point, Chatswood, Burwood, Ultimo, Artarmon, Hurstville, Chatswood West, East Wood, Hurstville Grove, Homebush, Campsie, Homebush West, Ashfield, Carlingford, Carlton, Kingsgrove, Penshurst, Beverly Hills, Harris Park, Parramatta, Narwee, Marsfield and Allawah are the New South Wales areas noted as having double figure percentages of Chinese people in the area.

The ‘About Us’ page is just as elusive as the rest of the site.

“House sales data is quite open and transparent in Australia, weekly auction results, recent sold prices on famous realestate (sic) websites and agent websites etc. (sic)," it says.

“However, the data is scattered on many corners of the internet, and the detailed historic sales data must be paid for,” it explains.

It notes that their idea was to build a free “home sold price website” that automatically collects data from many sources for home buyers.

Their FAQ notes that the data is updated daily, with the oldest home auction record in 2008 and that the data comes from “weekly auction results, realestate (sic) agents and famous realestate (sic) websites”.

Property reports on the site are not completely up to date. We double checked some recent settlements (in the past three months) that we have been aware of and found that the records still retain their older details.

On FlatMates.com at least one user has linked to this site instead of a mainstream listings portal to advertise a room available for rent in St Kilda.

Property Observer has requested comment through the available Feedback form on the website.

If you have a tip on where this site comes from and the source of the data, email: jduke@propertyobserver.com.au