What is gross rental yield?
Gross rental yield is a property's annual rent as a percentage of its value: (weekly rent x 52) divided by the price, times 100. It is a headline comparison figure only — it does not subtract costs like council rates, insurance, management fees, strata or loan interest. Your net (after-cost) return is lower. Use it to compare suburbs and property types, not to project actual cash flow.
Where do the price and rent figures come from?
Median sale price comes from NSW Valuer-General Property Sales Information (every settled sale in NSW is recorded). Median rent comes from NSW Fair Trading rental-bond lodgements (every new tenancy lodges a bond). Both are official open data. We compute a median per postcode and dwelling type and suppress any combination with fewer than 10 records.
Is this the yield for my specific property?
No — it is a suburb-level indicator, not a valuation. It reflects the median unit or house in your postcode, not your specific property's condition, exact location or features. Dwelling type (unit vs house) is inferred from the sales record, so treat it as a directional benchmark. Enter your own purchase price to see how your yield compares to the suburb median.
Why is only unit and house available, not townhouse?
The bond (rent) data distinguishes units, houses and townhouses, but the Valuer-General sales data does not cleanly separate townhouses — we infer unit vs house from whether the sale carried a unit/strata number. So yield is shown for units and houses only. For townhouse rent benchmarks, use the NSW rent gap calculator.
How do I work out my net (real) return?
Subtract holding costs — council rates, water, insurance, strata, property management, maintenance and loan interest — from your annual rent, then divide by your total purchase cost (including stamp duty and legals). Velofy's negative gearing calculator models the tax side of a rental loss, and the CGT calculator covers the eventual sale. This tool gives you the gross starting point.