1. Official government registers only
Every figure in a PropertyFlags report comes from an official government register: state planning portals, flood and bushfire mapping, the Building Commission NSW register of building work orders, EPA contaminated land records, heritage registers, crime statistics agencies and about twenty more, depending on the state. Each section of the report names the register it was read from, so you always know where a claim comes from.
Where something is our own calculation rather than a register entry, the report says so on the line. Winter sun angles and overshadowing are geometry we compute; aircraft noise outside the official contours is an estimate and is labelled as one. We do not dress estimates up as records.
2. No green ticks when a source is down
Government services go down. When a register does not answer, your report says that section could not be checked and invites you to reload later, when the link fills in. What it never does is show you a reassuring green result for a check that did not actually run. An empty answer from a register is also not the same thing as a clean one: where a register only lists notified sites, the report says that absence from the list is not proof of a clean history.
3. Tested before it is sold
Before a state goes on sale, we run the full engine against addresses drawn from that state’s official address register: five addresses from every postcode. Across the six states we sell in, the engine has been run against more than 11,000 real addresses. Where an address is outside our covered councils the run records an honest refusal, not a report, and more than 9,000 addresses produced a complete report end to end. This is how the quiet failures get found, like two government registers numbering the same unit differently, or a service that answers instantly with data that is years old. A daily automated check runs a known address in every state we sell, so a register that breaks overnight is noticed by us, not by a customer.
4. We do not sell what we cannot stand behind
Western Australia and the Northern Territory are not on sale. The engines for both are built and working, but the data there is not open licensed and the written permissions are still being negotiated with the relevant agencies. We would rather leave a state switched off than sell a report resting on data we do not have the right to use. The same rule holds within states: parts of Queensland are not on sale because some councils do not license their planning data for commercial reuse.
5. If we cannot build it, you do not pay for it
If your payment succeeds but a report cannot be generated for the address, you are refunded in full, automatically. If three or more core sections of your report stay unavailable even after refreshing, you are refunded in full on request. The details are in our Terms of Service, but the principle is simple: the risk of a bad build is ours, not yours, and this promise sits on top of your Australian Consumer Law rights, never in place of them.
6. What we do not collect
The free flag count needs no signup. We do not store your IP address with your queries, we never see your card details, and we do not sell or share the addresses you check. If you ask us to email you a free result, that email is stored with those counts for thirty days, used for the result and one reminder the next morning, and nothing else. There is no mailing list. If you unsubscribe we keep the address itself on a do-not-email list after that, because it is the only way to be certain we never write to you again. The details are in our Privacy Policy.
Questions about any of this: hello@propertyflags.com.au. If you want to see the rules in practice, read a full sample report.