Property data that holds up — built lean, owned by you.
I'm Kent Lardner, founder of Suburbtrends. For twenty-five years I've built the data assets, risk models and analytics that Australia's lenders, insurers, developers and property platforms rely on. I now bring that capability into client teams on contract — hands-on a day or two a week, or end to end.
How I work with you
Some clients want the full build — own and run your property data at scale, turn it into product with AI, retire the legacy workflows that eat your team's time. Just as often the job is narrower and more immediate: a piece of research done properly, a risk read on a portfolio, someone who genuinely understands geospatial property data for a few months. I do both, and the narrow brief is often the better way to start.
Research, on tap
Defined pieces of property and market research, done properly and explained in plain English, with the methodology attached so it stands up to scrutiny. Ideal as an embedded one-or-two-days-a-week arrangement when you have more questions than capacity.
Risk analysis
Property and collateral risk for lenders and mortgage insurers; market and demand risk for investors and developers. Concentration, scenario and portfolio work — measured the way it should be, by someone who has built risk products for the banks before.
Geospatial & data work
Hands-on with ABS geography (SA1–SA3, GCCSA), SEIFA, demographics and spatial property data — the analysis itself, and the sourcing, structuring and database work underneath it. The unglamorous parts that decide whether the answers are any good.
Data into product, with AI
Reporting, analysis and decision tools built straight off your own data using AI models — retiring slow, manual legacy workflows and giving your team back the hours they spend assembling answers by hand. Work that used to need a team often no longer does.
The full build
Where you want it: sourcing, structuring and maintaining property data you actually own and control, run lean — without an oversized team or stack behind it. Most organisations either overpay for data they don't control or carry a cost base larger than the answers are worth. I've spent a career proving there's a leaner way, and I'll build it inside your business the same way.
A career spent building the data others now depend on
I didn't arrive at property data from a content desk. I arrived from mortgage risk, valuation systems and platform analytics — building the infrastructure that Australia's property industry still runs on.
GE Mortgage Insurance — where it started
Sourced data from Australia's earliest property data providers to build mortgage-insurance and risk-analysis solutions, and led the valuation services team. Studied statistics and trained with industry experts in the United States and Canada — the grounding in risk and method that still shapes how I work.
Pricefinder — a national property platform
Co-founded and designed one of Australia's most comprehensive property data platforms, used by more than 5,000 real estate offices nationwide. Later acquired by the Domain Group.
CoreLogic — risk products for the banks
Led analytics and product for the banking sector — designing and rolling out risk and valuation products for valuers and lenders. The work extended to China, where I built an automated valuation model for ICBC, the largest bank in the world.
JLL — a database from the ground up
Designed an in-house property database and analytics capability, lifting the firm's real estate insights and client engagement off a foundation it owned and controlled.
Realestateview.com.au — Head of Data & Analytics
Rebuilt the data and analytics function and grew monthly traffic from 400,000 to 2.7 million visitors — a 575% increase — by turning property data into something people actually wanted to read.
Suburbtrends — independent research at national scale
Independent market research across every SA2, SA3 and SA4 in Australia — prices, rents, vacancy and listings, refreshed monthly and cited regularly across the national press. The published research is the standing proof that the data and the method hold up.
The bottleneck is never the prompt. It's the data underneath it.— Kent Lardner
Real answers about your market — not a model guessing
Everyone is bolting AI onto property right now. Most of it is useless, because a general model knows the internet, not your market — it will invent a median price as happily as quote a real one.
I've spent years integrating private property datasets into Claude and other large language models — getting clean, structured, trustworthy data into AI workflows that produce something reliable every time, with someone who knows the domain judging whether the output is actually right. That's the hard part, and it's the part I do.
It's the same skill set whether the job is a production tool your team uses daily, a proprietary dataset built as a competitive moat, or training and evaluation data for a property-specific model. And because I've already built this for my own operation, I can spin up a premium, working proof of concept on your own data — fast — as part of an initial, no-cost consultation. You see something real before you commit to anything.
Let's build a proof of concept on your data
Tell me the problem — a research brief, a risk question, a data mess, or an AI idea you can't get to behave. In an initial free consultation I'll show you what's possible on your own data, and whether I'm the right person for it. Engagements run from a single report to a standing day or two a week.
Suburbtrends · Independent Australian property data, risk & research · Available for contract and consulting