Frequently asked questions

Four products, all driven off a street address:

Geotechnical reports - a PDF desktop study covering geology, soils, groundwater and nearby bores. $119 per report.
Planning reports - zoning, flood, bushfire, heritage and other planning overlays, with a free interactive map preview. $9 per PDF.
GIS Data Export - the underlying site datasets as DXF, Shapefile, GeoPackage and KMZ, ready for CAD and GIS. From $15.
Scout - a Chrome extension that puts flood, elevation, terrain and estimate data on every realestate.com.au listing. $15 per month.

We also run free tools, including the AS 2870 site classification calculator and the 12d to DXF converter. See pricing for the full picture.

Geotechnical reports, planning reports and GIS exports all cover Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Each state has its own set of spatial data sources - geology, soils, groundwater, planning overlays and imagery - and our system queries the right sources based on the address you enter.

Scout currently covers South East Queensland only (Brisbane, Gold Coast, Moreton Bay, Logan and Redland).

Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory are not supported yet. Every state publishes its data differently, so each one needs its own integration rather than a switch we can flip.

If you need ground conditions - geology, soil reactivity, groundwater, bore logs - use a geotechnical report. If you need planning constraints - what the site is zoned and what overlays affect it - use a planning report. If you need the data itself to draw or model against, use a GIS export. Scout is for screening listings while you browse, not for a deliverable.

They are independent purchases, so many customers run a planning report first as a cheap screen and only order the geotechnical report or export on sites that survive it.

No. A single geotechnical report, planning report or GIS export can be bought as a guest with just an email address - the finished file is emailed to you and available from a private link.

An account (free) is needed to hold credits, see your past jobs in the dashboard, use the free interactive planning map preview, and unlock the account-only features in the free tools.

Addresses are matched against the official state address registers - the Queensland and NSW address registers and Vicmap Address - so if an address exists in your state's register we will find it. Try the street number and street name with the suburb (for example "42 Smith Street, Brisbane") rather than a unit number or building name.

Very new subdivisions can take time to reach the state register, and we deliberately do not fall back to an approximate global geocoder, because a near-miss would silently report on the neighbouring lot. An address we cannot resolve fails up front, before you are charged.

Typically 2 to 4 minutes. This includes geocoding the address, fetching data from a dozen or so government services, rendering the maps and assembling the PDF. Occasionally a slow upstream data service can extend this to 6 to 8 minutes. Planning reports and GIS exports are usually quicker.

You are not charged for a failed job. Geotechnical and export credits are only deducted once the PDF or ZIP has been successfully produced, and a failed planning report credit is refunded automatically. If you see repeated failures for an address, contact us and we'll investigate.

Data is pulled from state government spatial services at the time the report is generated, so it is as current as those sources. Geological mapping is updated infrequently (years) and soil classifications rarely change, while imagery, planning overlays and bore records are updated more regularly.

Every report carries its generation date so you know when the data was fetched.

LayeredGeo reports are intended as a desktop study aid - a starting point for site screening and preliminary geotechnical or planning context. They are not a substitute for a licensed geotechnical investigation or for planning advice, and should not be used as standalone evidence for engineering design, regulatory submissions or construction decisions without further investigation by a suitably qualified professional.

See the geotechnical methodology or planning methodology page for what each dataset can and cannot tell you.

A PDF covering the planning constraints mapped over a lot: zoning, flood, bushfire, heritage and character, noise and transport corridors, vegetation and environmental overlays, cultural heritage, easements and connected services. It is built from the same council and state planning datasets a town planner would open one by one.

It answers "what am I allowed to do here, and what is in the way" - which is a different question from the geotechnical report's "what is the ground like".

Yes. Sign in and enter any QLD, NSW or VIC address to see every overlay group on an interactive map at no cost. A credit is only used when you generate the $9 PDF report. There is no subscription and no minimum - the price is the same whether you buy one a year or ten a day.

The report says so explicitly. Zoning and the planning scheme overlay families are held state-wide for NSW and Victoria; Queensland is covered council by council, since each council publishes its own planning scheme data.

Where we do not hold mapping for a location, that layer is reported as not assessed rather than as a clear result - an unmapped overlay is not the same as an absent one, and the free preview shows you exactly what is assessed before you buy.

Yes, as a data reference. A planning report states the mapped zoning of the lot - the answer Part 3 of Form 2 asks for - and shows heritage overlays and mapped easements. It also covers the matters Form 2 tells buyers to investigate themselves, such as flood, bushfire and connected services.

It is not a disclosure document and does not replace the official title search, EMR/CLR search, body corporate certificate or the council-issued certificate itself. See the Form 2 planning data guide (QLD) or the section 10.7 certificate guide (NSW).

Yes - we publish free planning profiles for suburbs across South East Queensland, NSW and Victoria, each with a zoning breakdown, the constraints that dominate the area and a schematic map. No account needed.

The GIS Export tool clips current spatial datasets to a QLD, NSW or VIC address, drawn extent or uploaded boundary and packages them for CAD and GIS. Depending on the dataset, outputs include DXF, Shapefile, GeoPackage, KMZ, GeoTIFF, DXF TIN and georeferenced imagery.

DXF - for AutoCAD, Civil 3D, BricsCAD and most CAD packages.
Shapefile (.shp) - the standard GIS vector format, compatible with ArcGIS, QGIS and others.
GeoPackage (.gpkg) - a modern open format supported by QGIS, ArcGIS Pro and most GIS tools.
KMZ - for Google Earth and lightweight spatial review in tools that support KML/KMZ.

Elevation is delivered as a DEM raster, and a TIN surface is available as DXF.

The current catalogue includes property boundaries, roads, easements, contours, elevation points, a GeoTIFF DEM, DXF TIN, watercourses, geology, soils, acid sulphate soils, planning zones, flood, bushfire, geohazard and heritage overlays, plus available aerial imagery. The live dataset list is the source of truth as coverage expands.

Not every dataset is available in every state or format. Each ZIP includes human-readable and machine-readable manifests that say what was included, assessed with no features, not covered, deliberately unavailable, or missed because an upstream service failed.

Georeferenced aerial imagery is available for QLD and NSW addresses only. It is not included for Victorian addresses, because Vicmap aerial imagery is licensed and cannot be redistributed in an export.

For an address export, data is clipped to a buffer around the property. The buffer varies by dataset - tighter for property-specific layers like boundaries, wider for contextual layers like geology and roads.

Yes. In the export tool you can draw an extent on the map or upload a boundary as GeoJSON, KML, KMZ or a zipped Shapefile. Custom areas are billed at 1 credit per km² (or part thereof), up to 20 km² per export. The tool shows the exact credit cost before you run it.

Vector data is clipped to your shape; imagery and elevation cover its bounding box.

No credit is deducted if an export fails. Credits are only consumed after a successful ZIP download is produced. If a dataset is unavailable but the rest succeeds, the ZIP is marked as partial and lists what is missing, so you always know what you did and did not get. If you experience repeated failures, contact us.

Scout is a Chrome extension that adds a small badge to every realestate.com.au listing showing flood likelihood, elevation, terrain, road busyness and an estimated value, plus heritage, bushfire, transport and zoning screening. It's aimed at buyers and agents screening a lot of listings quickly, rather than at producing a deliverable.

$15 per month including GST, cancel any time. Coverage is currently South East Queensland: Brisbane, Gold Coast, Moreton Bay, Logan and Redland.

No. Scout is a separate monthly subscription with its own sign-in, and it does not draw on geotechnical, planning or export credits.

The AS 2870 site classification calculator works out a site class from soil profile inputs, and the 12d to DXF converter turns a .12da or .12daz handover into a layered DXF that opens in any CAD package, with no 12d licence required.

Both are genuinely free. A free account lifts the daily limits and unlocks extras such as the geometry and setout report (CSV), LandXML alignment export and surface (TIN) exports.

Purchased credits never expire - geotechnical, planning and export alike. Once bought, use them whenever you need.

Each product has its own balance and credits are not interchangeable, because the products cost very different amounts to produce. Monthly export subscription credits reset at the start of each billing period and don't carry over.

Yes. The monthly GIS export plan and the Scout subscription can both be cancelled any time, and you keep access until the end of the current billing period. There are no cancellation fees.

Geotechnical and planning reports have no subscription at all - you buy credits as you need them.

Yes - every price shown includes GST and is in Australian dollars. $119 per geotechnical report, $9 per planning report, $15 for a single GIS export, $15 per month for Scout. No surprises at checkout.

We assess refund requests case by case. If a job failed to generate, or the output was clearly incorrect because of a data or rendering error on our side, we'll refund the credit or issue a replacement. Contact us with your account email and the address concerned.

All payments are processed by Stripe. We never store your card details. Stripe is PCI DSS Level 1 certified.

We log usage (account ID, address, timestamp) for billing and support purposes. Generated PDFs and export ZIPs are stored temporarily and purged after a short period. We don't sell or share your data with third parties. See our privacy policy.

All spatial data comes from Australian state and federal government open data, plus council-published planning scheme datasets:

Queensland - QSpatial and the Queensland Government spatial services (geology, soils, imagery, elevation, administrative boundaries), council planning schemes for Brisbane, Gold Coast, Logan, Moreton Bay, Ipswich, Sunshine Coast and others.
New South Wales - NSW Six Maps, NSW Seamless Geology, NSW Environment and the NSW ePlanning Portal, state-wide.
Victoria - Vicmap, DataVic and DEECA, including Vicmap Planning, the Victorian Flood Database and the Victorian Heritage Register.
National - the National Groundwater Information System (NGIS) for bores and the Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia.

See How It Works and the methodology page for the full source list.