Data Dictionary

NSW Valuer General

Property Ids

This is a number that indirectly refers to one or more NSW LRS Folio id. It's actually more appropriate to think of this as a land id. What the NSW VG considers as a property is not always a single lot:

• Sometimes it's multiple lots part of the same transaction.
• Sometimes portions of lots are considered part of a property.
• Every property on the same strata plan will have the same property id, but each of those properties will have its own strata lot id.

Property Descriptions

Think of this as a descriptive aspect rather than a prescriptive aspect of a property, no property is really ascribed this information in the NSW LRS data. By the time it ends up in the valuer general it's very likely an almagamation of several different identifiers relevant to making a valuation.

NSW LRS

Archive Sales

Problems with it

• You'll often find multiple sales for the same property on the same day with no detail distinguishing between the different sales. Even tho it's very likely different parts of the same property sold to different people but this is not reflected in additional piece of information including the property description.
• no strata lot data
• no settlement date provided
• no dealing number

Valuation numbers

This is a field available in the archive data not in the later data, so far I haven't found much use for it. It's probably useless, outside a focus on historical data that requires it.

Property Ids

This doesn't actually exist in the NSW LRS, instead it's a proxy used by the valuer general

Dealing Number

This is a unique number provided with each house sale.

Uniqueness & Duplication

• There should be one dealing number per sale.
• There can be multiple properties in the same sale, so you can fine multiple rows for different properties in the PSI data.
• When there are duplicates of the same property & strata lot for the same dealing, this is typically duplicate data, go with the one withe latest provided date.

When data is repeated

To see an example of duplicate data use the following query:

WITH
  common_dealing_numbers AS (
    select count(*), dealing_number from nsw_vg_raw.ps_row_b group by dealing_number order by 1 DESC limit 1 offset 1),
    
  entries_of_sale AS (
    select file_path, sale_counter FROM common_dealing_numbers left join nsw_vg_raw.ps_row_b b USING (dealing_number)),
    
  sale_particants AS (
    select file_path, sale_counter, ARRAY_AGG(d.participant) AS participants
      FROM entries_of_sale
      left join nsw_vg_raw.ps_row_d d USING (file_path, sale_counter)
      group by (file_path, sale_counter))
    
select b.date_provided, d.participants,
       c.property_description, b.district_code,
       b.property_id, unit_number,
       house_number, street_name, locality_name,
       postcode, area, area_type,
       contract_date, settlement_date,
       purchase_price, nature_of_property, primary_purpose,
       strata_lot_number, sale_code, interest_of_sale, dealing_number
  from entries_of_sale 
  left join nsw_vg_raw.ps_row_b b USING (file_path, sale_counter)
  left join nsw_vg_raw.ps_row_c c USING (file_path, sale_counter)
  left join sale_particants d USING (file_path, sale_counter)
  ORDER BY b.date_provided DESC;

There's actually 107 rows here for this same sale, they mostly just have the same stuff, some are missing data tho.

Legal Property Descriptions

Often this is just a cluster of legal identifiers relating to the property.

Difference between descriptions in LV & PSI data

• In the PSI data, legal descriptions entries tend to refer to a single property, not necessarily what the LRS considers a single property, as multiple houses can exist on a property. In most cases, a single property is a single lot with a single house, but this isn't all cases.
• In the land value data, legal descriptions entries refer to everything associated with the NSW property id.

Parcels Ids

Parcels tends to be made up of 3 seperate identifiers

• A lot identifier
• A section identifier
• A plan identifier, either a strata or deposit plan

Each of those identifiers can be made up of either numbers and letters. You can find the parser for the different possible syntaxes here.

Examples

Here are some examples of parcel ids.

• A/1231 means Lot A of Deposit Plan 1231
• B/32/1313 means Section 32 of Lot B of Deposit plan 1313
• PT 5/1243 means Part of Lot 5 of Deposit plan 1243
• Strata plans
  • 1/SP1232 means Strat lot 1 of Strata plan 1232
  • CP/SP1231 means Common property of Strata plan 1231

Compress format

When a property has more than one on, the property id in the valuer general data tend to be provided in a compressed format. Here are some examples:

• 1, 2/1231, meaning Lot 1 & 2 of plan 1232
• PT 1, 2/1213 Meaning Part of lot 1 but all of lot 2 for plan 1213
• PT 1, PT 2/A Meaning Part of lot 1 & 2 for plan A
• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6/1231 Meaning lot 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 of plan 1231
• 1/A 2, 3/B PT 3/C Meaning
  • Lot 1 of plan A
  • Lot 2 & 3 of plan B
  • Part of Lot 3 of plan C

They can start to get quite unwieldily.

Modern vs Legacy Parcel

Data published before 2004-08-18 use a slightly different format where they use 2 slashes whether or not there was a specified section number.

• Before 2004-08-18
  • 12/200/1231
  • 12//1232
• After 2004-08-18
  • 12/200/1231
  • 12/1232

These still refer to the same thing, it's just that the format seen in the PSI data changes at some point.

PSI Archive format

PSI Data from before 2002, is differently formatted, and uses an older format for legal descriptions

• 12/1231 would be written as LOT 12 DP 1231
• A/B/C would be written as LOT A SEC B DP C
• 1/SP1 would be written as LOT 1 SP 1
• 1, 2, 3/1231 would be written as LOTS 1-3 DP 1231

All this data was published on 2015-09-09 mostly consists of contracts between 1990 & 2002

Linking NSW LRS Property Description data with GNAF

Data that has a LRS legal description can be linked against GNAF data to get address information, and in the absence of a proper shape file you can use GNAF data to link against ABS mesh blocks.