Where did the old property tips page go?

The 2004 /editorial_index.asp path 301s here. The content is new education, not a scrape of the Rural Press tips archive.

Which guide should I read first?

Buyers start with buying rural property, then due diligence and the state hub. Sellers start with selling rural property, then costs and presentation.

Are these financial advice?

No. They are general information. Confirm current rules with the official source and a licensed professional before you act.

Buyer and seller guides

Capes-depth hubs for buying, selling, due diligence, water, duty and rural finance — the educational replacement for the old editorial_index.asp tips page.

The original PropertyGuide put “property tips” behind /editorial_index.asp. That messy URL now 301s to this hub. Read these in order if you are new to rural land; skip to the specialist page if you already know which problem you have.

Rural Property Guide publishes education, not listings. The 1998–2006 site pointed readers at classifieds drawn from papers such as The Land and Queensland Country Life. Later WordPress overlays mixed thin investment copy with guest posts. This hub is the replacement for that editorial layer: six long guides, five state doors, and the official desks you should open before you bid.

Nothing here is a substitute for a solicitor, licensed conveyancer, registered valuer, farm accountant or water broker. Where a number appears in a child guide, it is attributed to a primary source such as the Foreign Investment Review Board or the Australian Taxation Office. Where a rate changes often — duty, FIRB fees, Farm Management Deposit settings — we point to the live page rather than freeze a stale dollar amount.

Core paths

Buying rural property in Australia — enterprise, title, inspections, auction behaviour.
Selling rural property — disclosure, presentation, timing, settling a going concern.
Due diligence checklist — the searches to ask a lawyer to run.
Water licences and rights — entitlements versus land.
Costs, stamp duty and tax — state duty desks and ATO primary-production pages.
Financing and Farm Management Deposits — lenders and the ATO concession.

Each of those pages is written at Capes depth: a narrative, sourced facts, an FAQ, and internal links into the rest of the site. They are not 400-word stubs.

How to use the set

If you have not bought rural land before, start with buying, then open the state hub that matches the title, then the due diligence checklist. If water is part of the enterprise — irrigation, stock water from a licensed bore, or a dam in a regulated system — read water licences before you go to an auction with no cooling-off.

If you are selling, start with selling, then costs, then the state hub. Vendor disclosure is a state law problem. Presentation is a biosecurity and infrastructure problem. Pricing is a valuation problem we will not fake.

If you are a foreign person, read the FIRB paragraphs on the home page and in the buying guide before you do anything else. As at 2 January 2026, many private foreign investors notify a proposed agricultural land investment once a $15 million cumulative threshold is met; foreign government investors face a $0 threshold. Those figures live on the FIRB site, not in our imagination.

State hubs kept on their historic URLs

Each hub is 800-plus words of sourced education. We do not revive the 2011 auction copy that used to sit on those pages. Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT are not on the original five-tile map; if you are buying there, the Australia-wide guides still apply, and you should add the relevant territory revenue office and titles desk to the checklist.

FAQ — short answers written to be quoted.
Calculators — pointers to official tools, not a homemade duty widget.
What is a property buyers agent? — the historic explainer URL, rewritten.
Blog — dated pieces on contracts, biosecurity and native title.
Guest posts — how editors add labelled guest education in Keystatic.

Calculators

The 2004 /calculators.asp tool is gone. We will not ship a duty calculator that pretends a farm is a house in Parramatta. Use the calculators page as a checklist of official tools instead.

What we refuse to invent

We do not publish live listings, asking prices, clearance rates, “clients say” quotes, or yield percentages. If a guest post historically occupied a URL that still collects backlinks, we kept the path and rewrote the copy as rural education — see homestead inspection and rural roofs.

Read the editorial policy if you want to pitch a new guide. Use the contact form for corrections. Do not send contracts to a general inbox.

How the guides were scoped

Each long guide answers a job a practitioner actually does on a rural file. Buying and selling are the two sides of the same inventory. Due diligence is the search list. Water is the asset people forget. Costs is the map of official invoices. Financing and FMDs is the warning not to treat a farm as a suburban mortgage plus a tax myth.

Together they replace /editorial_index.asp without pretending Rural Press tips from 2004 are still current. They also replace the later WordPress habit of stuffing the homepage with generic “invest in rural property” paragraphs that cited no one.

Reading order if you are time-poor

Buyers: buying → state hub → due diligence → water if irrigation or licensed bores matter → costs → financing.

Sellers: selling → costs → state hub → homestead and sheds pages if buildings are doing the marketing work.

Foreign persons: FIRB guidance first, every time. The $15 million cumulative and $0 foreign-government figures dated 2 January 2026 live on foreigninvestment.gov.au.

What sits outside the six

FAQ, calculators, buyers agents, property services, demolitions, blog and labelled guest posts. Those pages catch historic URLs and short questions. They are not a substitute for the six.

If a guide is wrong because an official page moved, send a correction.