When we started building Close Enough, the obvious product was a liveability score. Feed in an address, show a number out of 100, sort suburbs by that number. Almost every property app does it.
We decided not to.
A score is an opinion pretending to be a fact. To produce one you have to decide how much to weight crime versus flood risk versus distance to the nearest primary school versus what percentage of trees line the street. Every one of those weightings is a judgment about what liveability means, and those judgments vary wildly between people.
A family with three kids wants walking-distance schools. A cyclist wants bike lanes. Someone with asthma wants air quality. A first-home buyer wants a rail line. A pensioner wants a flat footpath and nearby medical services. None of these people want the same score. Producing one number and telling all of them "this is the answer" is dishonest. It also happens to be the easiest way to sell a product.
The Close Enough Methodology page lists every dataset, its source, when it was last refreshed, and what it cannot tell you. Crime data is LGA-level, not street-level, because the ABS does not publish lower. Air quality is measured at EPA stations that may be kilometres away. Flood zones come from the Victoria Planning Schemes, which have known gaps in recently developed areas.
None of this makes the data unusable. It makes it honest. If you know a number is LGA-level you know not to treat it as street-specific. If you know air quality is from a station three kilometres away you know to cross-check against proximity to industrial sites.
A product that sorts suburbs by liveability is easy to sell. A product that shows you the data and says "you decide" is harder. Users have to do the interpretation themselves. Press coverage is harder to get because "their score says X" is a faster headline than "the data is nuanced."
We accept that. Close Enough is a tool for people making serious decisions about where to live, who deserve real information rather than a pre-chewed verdict.
The product is slower to explain and harder to market. It is also the only version we can defend.