You’re comparing four houses in three browser tabs. There’s a better way.
Buying your own home is not the same problem as building an investment portfolio, but it shares one awkward thing with it: you are almost never choosing between one property and nothing. You are choosing between the three-bedroom in the school catchment, the renovated place two suburbs over that costs $40k more, and the one you keep coming back to that needs a new roof but has the better block.
Right now most people manage that comparison in a spreadsheet, a notes app, a camera roll, and a set of open real estate listings they’re afraid to close. The information you need to make a $900,000 decision is scattered across five tools, none of which talk to each other.
The Homebuyer add-on exists for exactly this stretch of the process: when you have a shortlist and you need to hold several real properties side by side until one of them wins.
What it actually does
Property Insights’ free tier lets you track 2 properties. That’s enough if you’re an investor modelling a single acquisition, but it’s useless when your shortlist is five houses and you want all of them on screen at once.
The add-on lifts that 2-property cap so every candidate on your shortlist gets its own record, and it unlocks the side-by-side Compare view, which is normally a paid-tier feature. That means you can put four or five homes next to each other and compare the numbers, your notes, your ratings, and their locations on a map in the same place.
It’s a single purchase: $15 (£15, NZ$15) for a 3-month pack. No subscription, no recurring charge, no credit card kept on file to catch you out in month four. Three months is roughly the length of a serious home search, and when it lapses you’re back on the free tier with the two properties you care about most still there.
A concrete example
Say you’ve narrowed a Melbourne search down to four places:
- A $780,000 townhouse, body corporate $3,200/yr, needs nothing
- An $815,000 freestanding house, no strata, but $25,000 of kitchen and bathroom work
- A $760,000 unit closer to the station, body corporate $4,100/yr
- A $840,000 house on the edge of the catchment you actually want
In the Compare view you enter each purchase price, your deposit, stamp duty, and the ongoing costs, and you see the four monthly holding costs next to each other rather than in your head. The $760,000 unit looks cheapest until the $4,100 body corporate and the $25,000 renovation on the freestanding house both show up in the same table and reorder your thinking.
You rate each one out of five after inspection so Saturday’s impressions don’t blur together by Wednesday. You attach the building and pest report to the freestanding house, the strata report to the two with body corporate. You drop a note on the $840,000 house that the catchment boundary is confirmed, not assumed. And the map view shows you that the “closer to the station” unit is closer to the station and the freeway on-ramp, which is the kind of thing a listing photo won’t tell you.
Three weeks later, when two of the four have sold to someone else, you delete them and the picture sharpens on its own.
Why it’s separate from the investor tiers
Everything else in Property Insights is built for people running a portfolio: net and gross yield, LVR across multiple properties, cash flow forecasting over a holding period, SMSF and trust structures. An owner-occupier buying one home to live in doesn’t need most of that, and shouldn’t have to pay a monthly subscription to get the two things they do need.
So the add-on stacks on top of whatever you’re already on. If you’re on the free tier, it lifts your cap and unlocks Compare for three months. If you’re already a paying investor who happens to be buying a home for yourself as well, it stacks on top of that too. It replaces nothing.
If you end up an investor later, everything you entered is already in the app.
Stop juggling browser tabs.
$15 one-time, three months, no subscription.
Get the Homebuyer add-on