Abstract There is a considerable wealth of urban research that addresses questions of residential mobility and social change in neighbourhoods and suburbs. A major methodological challenge in analysing this mobility and its impact on local areas is bringing together household-level and aggregated area-level data. This paper addresses this methodological issue in the context of research about knockdown-rebuild (KDR) in Sydney. KDR is the demolition and replacement of detached dwellings by owner-occupiers. Using a database of Development Applications submitted to 30 local councils in Sydney in the last 5 years, over 6,000 applications for KDR were identified and mapped using GIS. A survey was sent to the whole sample, including questions about the motives to undertake KDR. KDR activity can be seen across all parts of Metropolitan Sydney, and therefore our interest focusing on whether, and how, the spatial context in which KDR interacts varies from place to place. To this end, the paper poses the following question: how applicable is it to utilise the profile of place as a means to both perform and contextualise analysis? To construct and analyse different contexts a socio-economic profiling exercise was undertaken, the details of which are provided in this paper. Four distinct locational typologies (or ‘KDR-markets’) were identified and these are attributed to the survey returns. In doing so, the applicability of using area profiling techniques to describe changing urban dynamics can be assessed. We discuss the validity of this approach in this paper alongside reporting survey findings contextualised against these typologies.