Chrome extensions for realestate.com.au: flood, zoning and elevation on every listing

If you spend your evenings scrolling realestate.com.au, you have probably wondered whether a Chrome extension could do some of the homework for you. The short answer is yes, and for Brisbane and South East Queensland buyers the homework that matters most - flood, slope, zoning and a sense of value - can now sit on the listing itself instead of in six other tabs.

This guide covers what a realestate.com.au browser extension can and cannot do, what to look for, and how Scout, our own extension, fits in.

What a realestate.com.au extension actually does

A browser extension runs inside the page you are already looking at. For property listings that means it can read the address off the listing, look it up against other data, and draw the result back onto the page as a badge, a panel or a row of tags. You never copy the address out, and you never leave the search results.

That is the whole appeal. The research you would normally do for one or two short-listed houses happens for every house you scroll past, which changes which ones make the short-list in the first place.

The checks worth having on a listing

Not every data point belongs on a listing card. The useful ones are the ones that rule a property in or out before an inspection:

• Flood risk. In Brisbane this is the big one. Council flood overlays and the 2011 and 2022 flood extents decide insurance cost, lender appetite and resale. Listings never mention it.
• Ground elevation and slope. How high the block sits (in metres AHD) and how much it falls across its width. Steep blocks cost more to build on and low blocks catch water.
• Overland flow. Heavy-rain runoff that has nothing to do with a river. A block can be kilometres from the Brisbane River and still be an overland flow path.
• Zoning. Whether the block is low-density residential, character residential, or something that allows a unit block next door.
• Heritage and bushfire overlays. Both restrict what you can demolish, alter or build.
• A price estimate. Not a valuation, but a sanity check against the agent's "offers over" language.

Anything beyond that - school catchments, demographics, sales history - is nice to have but does not change whether you go to the open home.

What to check before you install one

Extensions ask for permission to read the pages they run on, so it is worth a moment of care:

1. Where the data comes from. Flood and terrain data should trace back to council and state government mapping, not a model nobody can inspect. If the extension cannot tell you its sources, skip it.
2. Coverage. Most property data is council-by-council. An extension that shows a confident result for every address in Australia is almost certainly guessing somewhere. A good one says "not covered" rather than inventing a number.
3. What it does with your browsing. Read the privacy policy. An extension that looks up listing addresses has to send those addresses somewhere; it should not be sending anything else.
4. Lot-level, not suburb-level. Flood overlays change from one side of a street to the other. A suburb average tells you very little about the house you are looking at.

Where Scout fits

Scout is the extension we built for exactly this job. It runs on realestate.com.au and adds a compact badge to each listing in Brisbane, Gold Coast, Moreton Bay, Logan and Redland showing:

• Flood risk from the council overlay and historical flood mapping, resolved to the individual lot
• Ground elevation in metres AHD, and slope across the block
• Overland flow
• Zoning, with heritage and bushfire screening as tags
• Road busyness, transport access and recent development applications nearby
• A PropTrack price estimate

Everything traces back to Queensland Government LiDAR terrain data and each council's published planning scheme overlays, the same sources behind our $9 planning reports and the suburb-by-suburb statistics on our planning map area pages. Listings outside the five SEQ councils show no badge, not a guess.

It is free to install from the Chrome Web Store and $15 a month to use, cancelled from your account page whenever you like.

What about on a phone?

Mobile browsers do not run Chrome extensions at all, which is a real gap when most listing browsing happens on the couch or at an open home. The Scout subscription includes Scout for mobile, a web app you can add to your home screen. You type or paste an address and get the same flood, elevation, slope, zoning and screening result, with a recent-searches list and a side-by-side compare view for the short-list.

A screening tool, not the final word

An extension is for the browsing stage. It tells you which listings are worth a Saturday and which are not. Before you sign a contract you still want the council's own FloodWise or flood-check report, a building and pest inspection, and, if the block is steep or low, proper geotechnical advice. For a written record of every overlay on a particular lot, a planning report does that for $9.

Common questions

Is there a Chrome extension that shows flood risk on realestate.com.au? Yes. Scout by LayeredGeo adds a badge to every realestate.com.au listing in South East Queensland showing flood risk, elevation, slope, overland flow, zoning, bushfire and heritage screening and a price estimate. It is free to install and $15 a month to use.

Does a realestate.com.au extension work on Domain as well? Scout currently runs on realestate.com.au. For a Domain listing, or any address at all, Scout for mobile takes a typed address and returns the same result in any browser.

Can an extension tell me whether a house flooded in 2011 or 2022? Scout shows whether the lot sits within the council's historical flood mapping and its current flood overlay likelihood band. It is a screening indicator drawn from published mapping, not a record of water inside a specific house; the council flood report and the seller's disclosure are the places to confirm that.

Do I need an extension if I already use the Brisbane Flood Awareness Map? The Flood Awareness Map is the authority and worth checking for any house you are serious about. The extension is for the stage before that, when you are scrolling past forty listings and do not want to look up forty addresses by hand.

About this article. This article was drafted by an AI writing tool using LayeredGeo's data and published automatically. It is general information about how property and ground conditions are commonly assessed in Australia. It is not engineering, planning, legal or financial advice, it is not specific to any property, and it may contain errors or be out of date. Check anything that matters against the source dataset or a suitably qualified professional before you rely on it. If you spot something wrong, tell us at hello@layeredgeo.com.au and we will fix it.

← All articles