Adam, here is your rooming house journey
The search is live. You did the early sourcing legwork, and now we accelerate it: curated shortlists, inspections on the ground, and negotiation when the right one shows up. This page is your living game plan, the candidates on the table, the strategy we locked in, and our read on every suburb. It updates as we move.
Buy under market, convert, hold, repeat
An under market metro Melbourne house, converted into a high yielding rooming house, held long term with the equity refinanced into the next one. You chose this over a regional new build for the location, the lower planning risk and the cheaper entry. These are the five things every property gets measured against.
Ranked for your brief
We score every area on what actually keeps rooms full: universities, hospitals and jobs nearby, transport, renter depth and the growth story. Then we weigh that against entry price and your 10% floor. Tap any suburb to open the full read.
Where the supply gap is
Live counts from the Consumer Affairs Victoria register, set against population. A low number where demand is strong is the gap we want to buy into.
Your candidates
Every candidate scored against your brief on the rooming house play. The suburb rank column carries the suburb’s standing through from the assessment, so you can see where a good house sits in a weak suburb and the reverse. Tap Report for the full read, or Map to see them geographically. Sold and withdrawn stock sits below for reference.
Sources: our discovery and kick off calls, your email and messages, suburb research from YIP, HtAG, ABS 2021 Census, Domain and government infrastructure records, and the Consumer Affairs Victoria rooming house register, Aug 2026. Market information is general in nature and verified against live comparables before any offer. Not financial or tax advice.
How every property is scored
One composite score out of five, built from four pillars weighted to your brief in your own words on 12 August. Everything below is modelled from plans, listings and published data. It ranks properties against each other. It does not forecast what any one of them will do.
Indicative yield on total project cost, then discounted by how easily rooms are likely to fill in that street. A yield is a forecast until the rooms are full.
Three quarters suburb, one quarter street. The suburb part is recent trajectory and how land constrained it is. The street part is income, home ownership, crime and social housing.
Room count and cost per room, four fifths. How tolerant the street is of the approval, one fifth, because a conversion you cannot get approved is not an efficient one.
Land available for a future purpose built rooming house or a rebuild, scaled continuously from 600m², with a bonus where a subdivision or second dwelling looks possible.
The gates
Four requirements you set. The first three are facts rather than judgements, so a property that fails one is ruled out regardless of how it scores.
The street readings
Four neighbourhood figures pulled per address. Each one points in more than one direction, so none of them is simply good or bad.
Risk factors
Four checks per property, shown as icons on every row: flood, bushfire, easement and heritage. Each one has four possible states, and a suburb level concern is never shown as a property flag. It belongs in the note on the card.
Heritage is the exception to all of it. The title dataset does not carry heritage overlays, so a clear reading there means nothing. Heritage only ever comes from RP Data and the planning property report, and where the two sources disagree the planning source wins.
Deal control
An off market or passed in property adds 0.15, because there is room to negotiate and no auction day competition. An auction deducts 0.20, because there is no cooling off, no finance clause, and the price is set on the day.
Where the numbers come from
Room counts are read off floor plans against the 7.5m² Victorian minimum. Anything Super Cashflow has assessed is modelled on a flat $90,000 conversion allowance, covering permits, compliance, walls and the wet area work. Properties not yet assessed carry a band read off the plan, modelled at the top of that band rather than the bottom. Room rates are now modelled at $250 a week, your call on 18 August. The Frankston average reads $283, so $250 is deliberately conservative and every yield on this page is the low case rather than the likely one. Management is modelled at 14% of gross rent as the standard across every property, which is where specialist rooming house management sits rather than the 7% to 8% a single tenancy attracts. Conversion costs are allowances, not quotes. Block sizes, zoning and lot plans come from title data. Overlays come from RP Data and the planning property report, which take precedence over any other source. Nothing here is settled until inspection, a written rental appraisal and a builder’s quote.