Blog, Finance, Marketing, Mortgage Calculators

Add a Stamp Duty Calculator To Your Australian Finance Website

BeliefMedia consistently deliver extremely high leads and conversions for Australian mortgage brokers, financial advisers, and real-estate agents... and we dare anybody to suggest they're better suited to this market than we are. Because we do more than 'just' marketing, we've provided a suite of tools for financial websites that'll keep your customers and others coming back to your website as a resource. Every time an individual is drawn to your website presents another conversion opportunity, and our tools are a type of organic lead magnet that users and search engines love. If you don't provide the fast-loading tools people need they'll invariably end up on a competitors website... providing the other guys with an opportunity to poach your potential client.

One of the tools we provide clients is a simple Australian Stamp Duty calculator. Because of the ongoing variances to legislated duty calculations we built an API that's updated as necessary on our end to provide ongoing accurate results. The API and plugin are made available to any client and qualifying members of our 'finance service' mailing list.

Since every website is designed differently we generally style the results to fit the theme of your site or landing page (those unsightly aggregator tools are appalling). That said, the WordPress plugin will return generic results by default not totally unlike the simple implementation below (without the first home buyer options and other legislated exceptions). At the time of publishing this article South Australian results are missing (for some modifications).

Note: The presentation of this calculator is awful after a recent website update. Styling will be modified soon. The client version we provide is vastly different, and includes state-based options and other applicable grants (the API is meant to be used in other applications - not on a website).

Note: Stamp Duty calculator removed for a revision.

The plugin includes an "email to me" feature - providing you with a means of capturing an email address and plugging the visitor into an appropriate funnel.

Note: Some modifications need to be made. By the time this article finds its way online we hope to have mortgage and transfer fees incorporated.

The calculator is generally modified for our clients to fit the theme of their website. While a real-time slider version will be made available soon, the benefit of the API-based tool is that it can used anywhere and will always reflect changes. For example, when calculating home-loan affordability and repayments, the applicable duty can be displayed alongside other data. For real-estate clients, the applicable duty taxes are displayed on each property page.

PHP Function

If you have an API key, the following simple function may be used to retrieve data outside of WordPress.

<?php

Add a Stamp Duty Calculator To Your Australian Finance Website

http://www.beliefmedia.com/stamp-duty-calculator

function beliefmedia_stamp_duty_array($value, $apikey = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx') {

if ($apikey == '') return false;

$data = @file_get_contents('http://api.beliefmedia.com/finance/duty.php?v='. preg_replace("/[^0-9.]/", '', $value) . '&key=' . $apikey);

if ($data !== false) {

$data = json_decode($data, true);

return ($data['code'] == '200') ? (array) $data['duty'] : false;

}

else return false;

}

The basic function returns an array that unfolds as follows:

Array

(

[code] => 200

[message] => Under test. Check values and report errors (xxxxx@belixxxxdia.com).

[value] => 850000

[duty] => Array

(

[nsw] => 33740

[vic] => 46070

[qld] => 31275

[tas] => 33435

[nt] => 42075

[act] => Array

(

[residential] => 31050

[commercial] => 15525

)

[wa] => Array

(

[residential] => 34890.5

[concessional] => NA

[general] => 37690

)

As we've done with our WordPress plugin, it's expected that you'll cache your results with Simple Cache until a modification is made to the source data. Of course, the API itself (as a hosted tool) is available to our own clients.

Considerations

The plugin also includes other financial calculator tools that we'll introduce in an upcoming article.
The BeliefMedia or Simple Cache plugin is required (the former should be used by clients).