Independent research & estimation · Melbourne
House of Research produces cost estimates, pay benchmarks and market analysis for organisations that have to justify a figure — to a board, a client, a regulator or a candidate. Every engagement ships with its basis: sources, assumptions and exclusions, stated in the open.
Services
Independent estimates and price benchmarking for bids, budgets and business cases — built to a stated class, with the accuracy range and the basis of estimate declared rather than implied.
Pay benchmarks by role, level and geography for recruitment firms and employers — percentile bands you can put in front of a hiring manager, with the sample and its limits described.
Commissioned research and sector analysis across Australian and New Zealand markets — demand and supply conditions, labour market intelligence, and the context a decision sits inside.
Investment and feasibility models for capital decisions, tested against the scenarios that actually threaten them — so the downside is priced before the commitment is made, not after.
Approach
Every engagement runs the same sequence, and you see the working at each stage rather than a result at the end.
What the figure has to support, who will challenge it, and the precision that actually warrants. Over-engineering an estimate is as costly as under-doing it.
Sources, assumptions, inclusions and exclusions agreed and written down before analysis starts — so the scope of the answer is never in dispute later.
Data assembled, cleaned and modelled. Where evidence is thin, that is reported as a range with its drivers, not smoothed into a single confident figure.
Sensitivity analysis, reconciliation against independent market evidence, and a deliberate search for the result that would contradict the finding.
A documented deliverable with the model, the sources and the limitations attached. You can defend it without me in the room.
About
House of Research is the independent practice of Sinem, an economist and researcher based in Melbourne, working across applied economic analysis, cost estimation and labour market intelligence for Australian and New Zealand markets.
The work sits at the point where research meets a commercial decision. Much of it is quantitative — modelling, benchmarking, estimation — but the useful part is rarely the arithmetic. It is knowing which comparison is fair, which data source is load-bearing, and where an apparently precise figure is resting on an assumption nobody has examined.
That discipline comes from a doctorate in investment modelling and from teaching the subject at university level, then applying it in commercial research: producing market intelligence, sector commentary and salary benchmarking used by organisations to set prices, budgets and pay.
Engagements run from a single benchmarking exercise through to ongoing research support. Smaller, well-scoped briefs are welcome — a defensible answer to a narrow question is often worth more than a broad report nobody reads.
Contact
If you would rather just write, or send a scope document across, email is fine.
hello@houseofresearch.com.auInitial conversations are free and genuinely useful — often the fastest way to work out whether the question you have is the question worth answering.
