Ever found yourself eyeing up an online property listing and asked yourself whether the place has access to the NBN?
Perhaps you work from home and don’t want your voice to become a garbled mess midway through an important Zoom meeting if you move in.
Well, there’s a browser extension for that.
NBN Availability Check automatically adds key information about a property’s internet connection to the online listing you are looking at.
It is available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox and works with listings on Domain, Realestate.com.au and other sites, displaying information such as the property’s typical internet speed and the type of NBN connection it has (i.e. fibre to the curb or fibre to the node).
NBN Availability Check was created by 18-year-old Luke Prior, who is moving to Sydney from Newcastle to start studying computer science at uni.
“Everyone’s got their Zoom meetings and school online,” he told The New Daily.
“It has become even more important. If you’ve got bad internet at your place, you really need to know what it’s like.
“So that was my main motivation.”
In the past, house hunters had to manually enter the address of a property into the NBN’s website to find this information.
“It’s really quite a big rigmarole,” Mr Prior said.
His browser extension does the work automatically.
Internet speed is becoming increasingly important for Australian house hunters.
Buyer’s agent and host of the Buy Your Side podcast Michelle May says nowadays, people are not just buying a home – they’re often buying a workplace or study space, too.
Having NBN access is a key factor in those decisions.
“It does affect your value, because if you can’t work from home, then you seriously have to think about it,” Ms May told TND.
“So having this browser extension where people see it from the get go, it’s definitely going to influence whether people are going to go for it, and it’s going to influence the price they pay for it.”
That’s the kind of response the tool has received just days after being released.
When Mr Prior shared his new tool on the main Australian subreddit, thousands of people upvoted it.
“It was a mix of people complaining about their own internet,” he said.
“And the other half were saying how helpful it is because they always had to go and manually check everything.”
