My sister was stickybeaking at property on the Gold Coast for a friend.
Listings are great at kitchens. They’re useless at the questions that matter. Does it flood? Which state school is it zoned for? How long is the bus to the hospital? Is the area rough? Answering that for one address means half a dozen government websites.
So I built one page that does it. Type an address, get the lot.
How long it took
Sunday afternoon, with Claude Code doing the typing.
- 2:22 pm: started scoping: which datasets exist, what they’re licensed for, what can run on my own machine.
- 2:27 pm: asked for a clickable mockup with fake data. It was live at 2:38 pm, eleven minutes later.
- 3:32 pm: said go on the real thing. Four agents ran in parallel: flood and bushfire, schools/crime/population, public transport routing, and address search. I wired up the front end and the server while they worked.
- 4:30 pm: all four data layers live, 58 minutes after the go-ahead.
- 4:37 pm: up on a private link for a few people, with an access key, rate limiting and a usage log.
A fifth agent then went looking for bugs and found two real ones. Switching to dark mode wiped every overlay off the map, and the server choked when 20 people ran reports at once. Both were fixed before anyone saw them.
I still had to steer. Its first idea for bushfire risk was a live incident feed. That’s handy if your house is on fire right now. It tells you nothing about whether to buy it. Out it went, replaced with mapped fire history back to 2013.
What it shows
- Flood: the Council’s City Plan flood overlay, its 2026 flood risk map, storm tide and coastal erosion. Checked across the whole lot where the boundary is known, not just a pin in the middle of it.
- Bushfire: the hazard class, plus every year since 2013 with a mapped fire within 2 km.
- Schools: the 2026 state school catchments the address is in.
- Crime: offence rates for the police division, the 24-month trend and the change on last year.
- Population: people per square kilometre, and the suburb’s Census numbers.
- Public transport: the nearest stops and how often they run, plus trip times to Surfers, the university hospital, Robina, Brisbane and the airport, by transit at 8 am on a weekday and by car.
- Map: click “Transit” or “Drive” to see everywhere you can get to in 30 minutes.
It covers Queensland addresses within about a 30-minute drive of Surfers Paradise. That’s most of the Gold Coast, up to Pimpama and down to Coolangatta.
Where the data comes from
All of it is free and open. No paid APIs, and no Google.
| What | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Addresses | G-NAF, August 2026 (Geoscape) | Open G-NAF EULA |
| Flood | City of Gold Coast City Plan v13 flood overlay; Flood Risk Overlay 2026; Queensland storm tide and erosion-prone areas | CC BY 4.0 |
| Bushfire | City Plan v13 bushfire hazard overlay; Queensland fire scar mapping (Landsat, Sentinel-2) | CC BY |
| Schools | Queensland state school catchments 2026 | CC BY 4.0 |
| Crime | Queensland Police Service offence rates by division | CC BY |
| Population | ABS Population Grid 2025, 2021 Census, regional population | CC BY 4.0 |
| Transport | TransLink SEQ timetable (GTFS), OpenStreetMap, routed with OpenTripPlanner | CC BY 4.0, ODbL |
| Map | OpenFreeMap, OpenMapTiles, OpenStreetMap contributors | ODbL |
Trip times come from running the actual TransLink timetable through a routing engine, door to door, including the walk to the stop and any changes.
What it doesn’t do
- Drive times assume no traffic. The M1 at 8 am disagrees.
- Crime is per police division and per resident. Tourist strips read high because the visitors aren’t counted as residents. It doesn’t show where anything happened.
- Flood is mapped risk. There’s no open record of past flood extents for the Gold Coast, and none of it covers stormwater. Get a Council flood search before you buy.
- Bushfire class covers the Gold Coast only, because the state map needs an emailed order form.
- Satellites miss small fires. The older record has the opposite problem. From 1987 to 2012 it found about five times as much “fire” a year as it has since, and a lot of that was sand, surf, tides and earthworks. I only use the quality-checked record from 2013.
- The timetable runs to 16 December, so it needs refreshing before then.
It’s a prototype built from public data, not advice. It’ll tell you where to look harder.
What’s next
If it earns its keep, the next step is a permanent home. Most of it would run on Cloudflare’s free tier. The routing engine wouldn’t, so trip times would be calculated ahead of time.
Incorporates or developed using G-NAF © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under the Open Geo-coded National Address File (G-NAF) End User Licence Agreement.
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