New property assessment tool available to rural investors
Rural property investors will now be able to assess the productive potential of a property before they buy it, following the release of a new online tool.
PropertyWise, developed by GrainGrowers’ Information Services aims to help potential customers assess the risk before investing in rural land, according to GrainGrowers’ general manager of products and services, Alicia Garden.
“We noticed property values weren’t estimates on how much of a certain commodity a farm could produce or the condition the land was in, despite the fact investors buy farms to make money,” she said.
“So we set out to provide accurate data that would allow prices to be set according to the productive potential of the land.”
PropertyWise will use 60 years of climate data and 20 years of satellite imagery to build up a picture of the way a parcel of land has been used in the past and to predict seasonal conditions into the future. The tool will tell investors how the land was managed, how well crops performed, when frost events occurred, when rain fell and how intense it was.
“One thing our development team has noticed while building this tool is that while the number of rainfall days across Australia are decreasing, the intensity of rain that does fall is increasing. PropertyWise allows us to gather and interpret this information accurately right down to farm level, which will give potential buyers a more accurate picture of the way the weather will impact on their ability to use the land,” Ms Garden said.