Frequently Asked Questions

An independent report on one specific address, covering the things that shape daily life there and that a listing will never tell you: air quality and noise modelled at the address, crime in the surrounding area, climate and natural hazards, schools, health and community services, food, recreation and attractions, transport, utilities and broadband, and the local property market.

Around twenty-five sections, every figure cited to the source it came from, and a methodology table at the end so you can check any of it yourself.

It is not a registered valuation, a building inspection, a title search or legal advice. It answers "what is it actually like to live here, and what does the wider data say", not "what is this house worth to the dollar".

Enter the address on the home page, choose a report type, and pay for that report. You can also order straight from a property on the Discovery map or from a listing page.

You'll need an account, so the finished report has somewhere permanent to live and so we can tell you when it's ready.

Usually 10 to 25 minutes. Each report is assembled from live queries across dozens of datasets and then rendered with its own maps and charts, so it isn't instant.

You can close the tab. We email you the moment it's finished, and the mobile app sends a push notification. Everything you've ever run stays under Account › My Reports.

Yes. Every finished report has a Printable PDF button that renders the whole report, maps and charts included, laid out for A4. No extra charge: it's the same report, printed.

Yes, into any of 47 languages besides English, from the language selector inside the report. Reports are always generated in English and translated on demand.

Translating a report into a language it has not been translated into before costs one credit, the same as a report, because it is a full re-rendering of the document rather than a browser translation. After that it is cached: reopening that language is free and instant, for you and for anyone you have shared the report with.

Numbers, units and source names are never rewritten by the translator, only the words around them.

No. There's no signup credit and no trial report: every SpotCheck is paid for individually, which is also why there's no subscription to cancel.

A referral link does not change that: you still start with no credits. The person who referred you earns 1 bonus credit once you buy your first credit. Referral links live under Account › Refer a Friend.

You pick the type when you order, from four options. Every type contains the same comprehensive core of data: air quality, noise, crime, climate, schools, health, amenities, transport, services and the local market. The type simply decides which extra tailored section is added at the top:

• Seller/Landlord adds your agency branding to the report.
• Buyer/Tenant adds Your Household, built around the people moving in.
• Farming adds Land and Farming Potential for a farm or lifestyle block.
• Investor adds a full Investment Analysis.

The full section-by-section comparison is on the Report Types page.

The core is identical. The difference is the one tailored section each adds.

The Buyer/Tenant report adds Your Household: per-member commute and hobby cards, school zones for the children you tell us about, pet-friendliness (off-leash parks, vet clinics), playgrounds, a growing calendar with frost dates, and accessibility detail where someone in the household needs it.

The Investor report adds Investment Analysis: gross and net yield, gross rent multiplier, cap rate, cash-on-cash return, mortgage serviceability, a ten-year growth projection for value and rent, forced appreciation potential, and a SWOT analysis drawn from the environmental, crime, demographic and market data in the rest of the report.

No. Renters and buyers get exactly the same report. Noise, air quality, crime, schools, commute times and services matter identically whether you're on a lease or a mortgage, so there's no cut-down "renter" version and no upsell to a fuller one.

Your agency logo and contact details on the report cover, so the same comprehensive report a buyer would run becomes a marketing asset you can share. Branding is set once under Account › Profile › Agent branding and applied automatically to every report you order after that.

Everything in a standard SpotCheck, plus Land and Farming Potential: usable land area and soil capability, enterprise suitability across crops, pasture and horticulture with gross-margin estimates, a seasonal planting and grazing calendar, livestock and crop disease watch, nearby farm services, rural land economics, and the compliance obligations attached to the title.

One deliberate omission: farming reports carry no automated value or rent estimate. Those models are trained on dwellings and mislead badly on land, so we leave them out rather than print a number we don't trust.

Yes. Order each one separately from the home page; each is charged as its own report. Plenty of buyers want both the liveability view and the investment numbers for the same address.

Not at the moment. Combined multi-property comparison reports are switched off while we rework them, so one report covers one address.

Every report still puts that address in context: it compares against the surrounding suburb, the wider city and the national picture, plus international reference cities. To weigh up two addresses, run one report each and read them side by side.

Gross rent multiplier, the price divided by annual rent. Lower is better.

Cap rate, net operating income divided by property value: the return if you paid cash.

Cash-on-cash return, annual cash flow after mortgage divided by your deposit, which shows whether the property pays you or costs you each month.

Growth projections, a ten-year model of value and rent built from the area's own historical trends, with a total return estimate.

Forced appreciation, comparing the property's rent against the suburb median. If it's under-rented, the report shows the income uplift and cap rate improvement available.

SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats built from the environmental, crime, demographic and market data elsewhere in the report.

The Check the Numbers panel lets you replace the purchase price, the weekly rent and the mortgage rate with your own figures; every metric recalculates in the page as you type.

One flat price per report. No subscription, no packs, no per-section extras and no cut-down "lite" version: every report is the full report.

A SpotCheck costs $29, charged when you order it. Prices are reviewed once a year.

No. Ordering with an empty balance simply charges your card for that report there and then.

Credits still exist if you want them: you can buy up to 20 in advance for gifting or for keeping a balance on hand, and one credit is one report. You're never required to hold any.

Purchased credits expire 12 months from the date of purchase, and expired credits aren't refundable. It's another reason pay-at-order is the simpler path unless you're deliberately stocking up.

The credit goes straight back to your balance automatically, whether or not you were watching the page at the time, and you'll get an email telling you it failed. Spend it on another report, or email us and we'll refund the money instead.

If a report isn't what you expected, email [email protected] within 14 days of purchase and we'll look at it case by case. Unused credits can be refunded at our discretion.

Where your local consumer law gives you a statutory right to cancel an online purchase, that right applies here too. It ends for any credit you have already spent generating a report, but an entirely unused purchase is refunded in full. The detail is in the Terms and Conditions.

Organisations can pool credits: colleagues on the same email domain draw from one shared balance, managed under Account › Organisation. Bonus and referral credits stay personal and are never pooled.

If you need more volume than that comfortably handles, talk to us.

Everything in a report comes from an official or public source, and every report cites them. Each section names the source behind its numbers as you read, and the report ends with a methodology table listing the exact source for each data point, how old it is, and a link to it. Nothing rests on "trust us".

Those sources are chosen per country and per region: national statistics agencies, environment regulators, police and justice agencies, mapping and land registries, weather and climate services, transport authorities, local government, and open geographic data. A report never quietly substitutes one country's data for another's; where a country doesn't publish something, the report says so rather than borrowing a number from somewhere else.

Two things we model ourselves, because nobody publishes them at address level:

Air pollution. A monitoring station measures the air where the station is, which is almost never where the house is. We train a deep learning model for each city on years of readings from that city’s official monitoring stations, alongside dozens of spatial layers: weather reanalysis, terrain and elevation, the road network and traffic volumes, industry, land use, vegetation and home heating. The model learns how pollution actually disperses across that particular city, then estimates concentrations on a fine grid, so any address gets a figure, including one a long way from the nearest monitor. Reports carry fine and coarse particulates, nitrogen dioxide and ozone, with seasonal and time-of-day patterns and a comparison against both the World Health Organization guidelines and the local standard.

Noise. The same problem, solved from the geometry rather than a microphone. Road traffic is calculated from the road network and measured traffic counts using a standard road-noise method, falling away with distance from the carriageway. Railways are modelled as line sources, weighted by what runs on them, freight being far louder than a light rail unit. Aircraft come from published airport noise contours, extended along the approach corridors aligned with each runway. Event venues, industry and other local sources are layered on top. The result is an estimated level at the address with a 24-hour profile, and the report is explicit that it is modelled, not measured.

Keeping it current. Public data decays: agencies republish, rename, restructure and quietly retire datasets. We monitor the government databases and open data portals behind every dataset we use, on a schedule matched to how often each one actually changes, and we are alerted when a source moves or goes stale.

Some of what we need is held by a public agency but never published. For that there is freedom-of-information law, which exists in most of the countries we cover under names like an Official Information Act request, a Freedom of Information request or a Right to Information request. It gives anyone, not just journalists, the right to ask a public body for the records it holds, and obliges that body to respond within a deadline set by statute. We use those requests to open up datasets that would otherwise simply be missing from a report, and to keep the ones we already have from going out of date.

Yes, and we encourage it. Every figure in a SpotCheck report comes from a publicly accessible source, and every report cites those sources so you can verify anything we show. There's no proprietary dataset and nothing you couldn't eventually find or model on your own.

What SpotCheck handles is the aggregation, the modelling and the maintenance. We monitor hundreds of government databases and open data portals across dozens of countries, keep each refreshed on its own schedule, spatially join datasets that share no common address format, and run the address through machine learning models trained on years of readings from official monitoring stations. Assembling the equivalent by hand takes several hours per property, assuming you already know which datasets exist, where to download them, and how to read them.

The air quality data is more difficult to replicate. The models are trained per city on that city's own monitoring stations, which is what lets them estimate pollution at an address sitting nowhere near a monitor. The sensor data underneath is public; building something genuinely accurate with it is the difficult part.

Noise is harder still, because there is no sensor network to start from. It has to be built from the ground up. Every road within earshot is carried through an established traffic-noise calculation: its traffic volume split across day, evening and night, its speed, the share of heavy vehicles, and its gradient taken from elevation data, since a truck labouring up a hill is measurably louder than the same truck on the flat. Each road becomes a source in its own right, and the level then falls away with distance under the inverse-square law rather than a convenient guess. Railways are added as line sources weighted by what actually runs on them, from freight down to light rail, with a correction where trains must sound their horns at level crossings. Aircraft come from published airport noise contours, extended along the approach corridors that follow each runway’s glideslope, so a house under the final approach is treated differently from one the same distance away but off the flight path. Event venues, industry and other local sources are layered on top, and the whole picture is combined into a single estimated level at the address with a 24-hour profile.

The data is public. The time, infrastructure and technical work to turn it into one readable report is what you're paying for.

It depends on the source, and we match the refresh schedule to how often each one actually changes:

Daily: weather and air quality inputs, which feed every report generated that day.

As published: crime statistics, rental bond and rental market data, and house price indices, typically monthly or quarterly depending on the agency.

On release: census and demographic data, updated when the statistics agency publishes a new round or a revision.

Annually: climate normals and the large geospatial datasets.

The vintage of each section is stated in the report's methodology, so you always know how old a number is instead of having to assume.

Air quality is modelled, not measured, at your address, and the report says so. A deep learning model is trained per city on years of readings from that city's official monitoring stations, combined with meteorology, terrain, traffic, industry and land use, so it can estimate concentrations between and beyond the monitors.

The report names the stations behind the estimate, shows seasonal and daily patterns, and compares the result against both the World Health Organization guidelines and the national standard, so you see the number in context rather than in isolation.

In nearly every market we cover, yes: taken from that country's own police or statistics agency and reported at the finest geographic unit that agency publishes. That unit differs from place to place, from something the size of a suburb to a whole district, so the report names the exact area it is using and how large it is rather than leaving you to guess. An offence category a source doesn't publish is shown as not published, never as zero.

The international comparison cities carry homicide rates only. It's the one offence recorded consistently enough across borders to compare honestly; countries count burglary and assault so differently that a category-by-category international chart would be fiction. We'd rather show one true number than five invented ones.

The report says so, plainly, and moves on. A gap is never filled with a guess, a national average dressed up as a local figure, or a plausible-sounding number from a language model. If we can't source it, you'll see that we couldn't.

55 countries across Australasia, Europe, the Americas and Asia, covering close to 3,000 cities and towns.

Six of those markets are covered nationwide, to any address in them, urban or rural. Everywhere else coverage is city by city. The quickest test is to type the address into the search: if we can report on it, it comes up.

They're peers, not a home market plus afterthoughts: each market has its own air quality models, its own crime and census sources, its own climate normals and its own regulatory context. Further markets are in build.

Both, and the report is explicit about which is which.

Modelled at the address: air quality, traffic, rail and aircraft noise, natural hazard exposure, sun and wind, and distances and travel times to schools, shops, hospitals and transport.

Reported for the surrounding area: crime, census demographics, and market prices and rents. Those are only published at area level by the agencies that collect them, so the report names the exact area it's using and how large it is.

Try the street address without a unit or apartment number first, then pick the specific unit if one is offered. Very new subdivisions sometimes haven't reached the national address dataset yet.

If it still won't appear, send us the address. We can usually add it, or tell you why it's missing.

Yes, and the Farming report type exists specifically for them. A rural address also changes what's worth reporting: bore or tank water instead of a mains supply, on-site wastewater, road access, distance to emergency services, and rural broadband and mobile coverage all get their own treatment.

Some of the words, none of the numbers. AI writes the plain-English summaries that introduce a section, and it powers the on-demand translation into 47 languages and the help assistant on this site.

Every fact, figure, rating and map layer comes from a data source or from our own models trained on measured data. A language model is never asked to supply a number, and never fills a gap in the data. The full policy is on the How We Use AI page.

You do, and only you. SpotCheck takes no commission from agents, agencies, banks, insurers or developers, sells no advertising inside reports, and has no referral arrangements that could shade what a report says.

That's rather the point: a report that told you what a seller wanted you to hear would be worth nothing. See the Independence Promise.

An automated fact-checker re-reads generated reports every day and traces each stated figure back to the data it was built from, flagging anything that doesn't reconcile: a chart that disagrees with its own caption, a number outside a plausible range, a source that has gone stale or dead.

Findings are reviewed daily and fixed at the source, so a fix reaches every future report rather than one customer's copy.

No, and it replaces neither. It isn't a registered valuation, a builder's or engineer's inspection, a title or boundary search, a property file held by the local authority, or legal advice.

Where a report includes an estimated value or rent, that's a statistical model of comparable sales and listings, clearly labelled as an estimate. Use it to sanity-check a price, not to bid to the dollar.

Tell us. Email [email protected] with the report link and what looks off. If it's a data error we'll trace it to the source and correct it for everyone, and we'll tell you what we found.

Nobody, unless you decide otherwise. Each report carries its own privacy setting, which you can change at any time from the report itself:

• Only me, the default. Just you.
• Listed people, specific email addresses you nominate, who see it once signed in.
• Anyone with the link, for sending to a partner, a lawyer or a client.
• Public, openly readable, and the only setting that lets search engines index it.

Someone who guesses the link to a private report gets a locked page, never the content.

Only to tailor the Buyer/Tenant report. Who's moving in determines which school zones matter, where the commute cards point, whether we look for off-leash parks and vets, and whether accessibility gets its own treatment.

It's stored on your account so you don't retype it each time, it's editable or deletable at any point under Account › My Household, and you can skip it entirely, you'll just get a less personalised report.

No. We don't sell, rent or trade personal information, and we don't tell anyone which addresses you've looked at. What we collect and why is set out in the Privacy Policy.

Under Account › Profile there's a Delete account option that closes the account and signs you out. If you'd like your reports and stored household details removed as well, email [email protected] and we'll take care of it.