Homeownership has felt out of reach for many but with recent changes and some knowledge, it might be easier than you think.
Anish Puri from Perth founded NestPath which is free and can help you with everything you need to get into the property market.
What is your side hustle?
NestPath is a free education site for Australian first home buyers: plain English guides to every state’s grants and stamp duty rules, and free calculators for borrowing power, stamp duty, deposits and repayments.
No sign up, no ads, and we do not sell anyone’s details to brokers. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anishpuri-nestpath
Why did you want a side hustle?
Not for the money at first.
We bought our first home and got blindsided by the costs nobody mentions: stamp duty, lenders mortgage insurance, conveyancing, inspections, and a sitework allowance that started at $20,000 and blew out toward $100,000.
I signed things I did not fully understand.
Afterwards I went looking for the free, honest guide that would have warned us, could not find one, and decided to build it.
How did you decide this was the right one?
It was the problem I had personally paid for. Every page on the site answers a question I wish someone had answered for me before I signed.
How long have you been doing it?
Since April 2026, so about five months.
What did you need to get started?
A domain, a laptop, the government’s own published rules and sale records, and a lot of evenings.
The hardest part was not building it, it was checking every figure against the state revenue office rather than copying what other sites say.
What have you needed to help it grow?
Two things. Real research, because journalists and other sites only cite you when you publish numbers they cannot get elsewhere, so we started computing our own from government data.
And partners, a small panel of licensed brokers and inspectors who take referrals, which is how a free site pays for itself.
How much time do you spend on it?
Most evenings and a good part of most weekends.
How much money do you make?
I will be honest rather than impressive: it is still small.
The site is free, and the income comes from affiliate links and referral partners.
The traffic is the number I watch, and that passed 8,000 Google visits a month in month five without spending a dollar on ads.
Biggest challenges and how you overcame them?
Nobody pays for honest. Almost every page that ranks for grants and stamp duty is a lead capture form with a calculator bolted on, so a free site has to win on being right.
That meant re verifying every state’s figures against the revenue office, and this year that mattered: WA, the ACT, Queensland and the federal deposit scheme all changed their rules, and we found dozens of well known sites still publishing the old ones.
Being the site that is actually current turned out to be the whole strategy.
Biggest achievements or happy moments?
Getting our research lodged with the Productivity Commission’s housing inquiry, seeing an article we wrote published on thetimes.com.au, and the first month the site passed 8,000 Google visits.
And every email from a buyer who says a guide saved them a fee they did not know was coming.
Advice for someone considering this as a side hustle?
Pick a problem you personally paid for, because you will understand the reader better than anyone.
Check every fact against the primary source, not another website.
And be free and honest for longer than feels comfortable, because trust is the only moat a small site has.
Future plans?
A public, dated record of every Australian first home buyer rule change, so buyers and publishers can see what changed, when, and what it replaced. Nobody publishes that today.
Check out NestPath on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
