We’ve updated Place Forecast with council housing and dwelling assumptions.
These new assumptions offer you a direct influence on housing and dwelling projections within your forecast. They are data inputs to the projection calculations, sourced from your council data, providing you with a powerful tool for accurate forecasting.
Councils can use these assumptions for various reasons. Here are a few:
To constrain the capacity of a small area
To compensate for an infill increase, for example, due to zoning changes
To boost growth via new building sites
Here, have a look at what we've done. I'll use the small area of Altona Meadows in our showcase forecast for Hobsons Bay as an example.
We capture these data inputs via an Excel sheet. We ask councils to fill it out and send it to us, and within a short amount of time (usually less than 24 hours), we've updated your forecast. You can do that as often as you wish; we don't charge extra for data updates.
This Excel sheet is a crucial part of this process. It's where you'll input your data, and it looks like this:
Each row in the Excel sheet represents an assumption. This is where you, as a council, can add and remove dwellings within small areas, override projections completely, or apply a maximum of possible dwellings (we call that a ceiling). These assumptions also change the average household size and the population in dwellings, giving you much control over the forecast.
Once the assumptions are in our system, this is what they look like:
In this case, we add 21 dwellings annually from 2026 onwards due to an infill increase from a zoning change.
Next, our system calculates the changes in the dwelling projections, which we call adjustments. Depending on the information within the assumption, we calculate dwelling assumption adjustments and sometimes housing assumption adjustments.
You can see the resulting adjustments of an additional 21 dwellings per year from 2026 onwards.
As always, you can dig deeper into the data by comparing adjustments across small areas.
When we calculate your forecast, we now include three sources of dwellings:
Census dwellings
Building completions
Dwelling assumption adjustments (this is the new one!)
We created a report showing the composition of the total dwellings over time.
Similar to the dwelling assumption adjustments, the Housing Assumption Adjustments are under this name in the Components menu.
Curious to find out more? Here's the documentation for everything housing and dwelling assumptions.
After almost two years in the business, we've found our groove, which mainly consists of two things we do repeatedly: improving the forecast and talking to councils. There's not a day gone by when we don't do both of these things.
Perfect is a verb, not a state, so we keep working on making the forecast better and better over time. The assumptions are a massive step in that direction, but I'm also talking about the small things here. For example, last week, we got upset about how cluttered the dataset page became. There are almost 60 datasets on that page now! So, we put a filter on top of those dataset lists, which helps us (and you!) to find datasets quicker.
There's also not a single day when we don't talk to our clients or catch up with councils interested in what we're doing. We learn so much from these conversations, and they give us valuable feedback for our work here.
Speaking of talking to councils, if you want to talk to us, we're here for you. Book a demo or just reach out with any question or concern you're having. We'd be delighted to talk to you!
Andrew and Bernd from Place Info
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