Frequently Asked Questions
Neighbourlytics is an urban analytics platform for neighbourhoods, we specialise in the creation of data about urban life the everyday activity that goes on within and between buildings in the neighbourhood.
You're probably used to using data about the physical environment to inform your property decisions, like land use or traffic, but you might not have good intel on local consumers, the local community, and the behavioural patterns, and this is critical because that is actually what drives return on investment and visitor attraction to local precincts.
Property developers use Neighbourlytics to gain a better understanding about their consumer, the context of the local community, to understand the amenities strengths and the amenity gaps and to make more confident and informed decisions and bankable business cases.
Property developers have used Neighbourlytics to design strategies that have resulted in 300% higher visitor attraction. It's also helped accelerate customer research with methods that are 10 times faster than traditional surveys.
Urban life is the everyday activity within and between buildings in the neighbourhood. It refers to how places are used, experienced, and valued.
Urban life data is the critical missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding people and places.
When making property decisions, we are typically used to looking at physical data about the physical environment, such as land use or traffic information, or information about people's ideas and aspirations for the future through surveys.
What we often don't understand is everyday behaviour, which relates to where people spend time, what their lifestyle values are, where they come from, where they go to, and all of the other lifestyle behaviours that are critical for understanding decisions about local tenancy mix, local amenity needs and understanding our local customer.
Every property development exists to attract people. It's the entire purpose of property development, but it's really hard to create great places for people without any data about the people. It's a little bit like trying to design a transport plan without any traffic data.
Urban life solves that missing piece of the puzzle. Property developers use urban life data to pinpoint their customer and community needs, to identify what the amenity mix in a local area should be or to understand the key points of difference or value propositions of a local place so that they're able to differentiate a marketing strategy.
Urban life data can help you generate strategies, that will increase your visitor attraction.
We've seen case studies of property developers increasing visitation by up to 300%.
It will help you accelerate your customer research. We've seen this happen 10 times faster than traditional methods like surveys are observations.
Tapping into Neighbourlytics will help you make more certain investment decisions, reduce your risk and optimise benefits that you might not have previously been able to see.
Think of a place where you love to spend time. It might be your local main street, the neighbourhood where you grew up, or a favourite holiday spot.
These places we love and feel connected to have distinctive personalities, they’re memorable.
We know that the best local places are vibrant and complex, they are authentic, and offer unique experiences. But the challenge facing city-makers is how to measure the ‘urban life’ we are seeking to create.
How can we quantify the nuances of local identity, and how do we know if our plans and strategies are getting it right?
Traditional (usually static) data sets are often not enough.
The census only tells the story of residents, and can be outdated before it’s even released.
Consumer research focuses on generalisations rather than diversity.
Community engagement processes can struggle to reach enough people to uncover the nuances of what’s unique and special about a local place.
Unlike postcode level statistics, this data is nuanced and hyper localised, making it highly valuable to urban planning, and understanding the evolution of places over time.
The Neighbourlytics Platform has three main interfaces.
Discover:
Discover is a national suburb search tool where you can view key socio-demographic and behavioural data sets across the county.
From Discover, you can generate a standard report for the highest activity area (1km radius) across the suburb.
Insights Dashboard:
A report generator with summarised the Lifestyle metrics into a easy to read and share format.
Standard Reports can be added to your library by selecting a suburb in Discover
Expanded Reports are available on request, providing access to custom geographies, or premium data sets.
Explorer:
Explorer is available as a tool with our premium Amenities data set to filter places by amenity type, time of day and day of week
You can also create smaller precinct maps within the study area.
Discover is a national suburb search tool, enabling you easy access to the following:
Some of the ways you can utilise Discover include to:
Understand the activity hubs across a suburb by looking at the locations people dwell.
Understand the destination ‘pull’ of a suburb by examining visitation patterns, including how far and wide visitors come from.
Compare activity levels across different times of the day, or week to understand how a neighbourhood is used.
Understand affordability by viewing the spread of income levels and household costs by selecting a suburb and weekly income, reviewing the map (colours representing percentiles in legend) and then clicking between weekly mortgage rent.
Amenity & Stakeholder Mapping
What drives people to visit, spend and stay? Identify the top local influencers and stakeholders by understanding how the community interact with local amenities across the neighbourhood.
Lifestyle Values [PREMIUM]
What do people care about? Highlight the most talked about activities and lifestyle values to give you insight into what local people care about most, as well as what's most unique.
Habits & Movement
Where do people spend time? Map out the key activities that form part of the daily life of local people, discover popular places and unique destinations. Find out where people come-from and go-to, and how far the travel.
Activity Trends [PREMIUM]
How is activity changing over time? See how lifestyle activities have changed over the past 12 months, and what is driving the change.
Local People
Who lives there? Nuanced socio-demographic information that is relevant to the lifestyle experience of the neighbourhood.
Catchment Analysis
How accessible is the neighbourhood? Accessibility analysis through the lens of walkability or drivability, including a high level snapshot into the demographics of each catchment type.
A Standard Insights report you can generate yourself from the Discover interface.
It is a 1km radius around the highest activity area of the suburb for the data month available in the platform.
You can generate this report and view it in the Insights Report interface.
When you have a specific project, geography or study area in mind, you can request an Extended Insights Report.
Our Extended Insights Report offer you the ability to:
The Neighbourlytics Premium data set is available with Extended Insights Reports and includes:
Lifestyle Values:
The way local people talk about their lives, and what they choose to post online about their experiences is a key indicator of local values.
By examining local chatter at a neighbourhood level it is possible to gain insight into how people love to socialise, where they love to spend time, and what activities they love to spend time doing.
Utilise Lifestyle Values to answer questions like:
How do people love to spend their time?
What activities do people value?
How do people socially connect?
What local places do people love?
Amenities:
Successful neighbourhoods provide a diversity of amenities to support the local needs.
Having a wide offering of local amenities provides increased opportunities to attract local people to visit and stay in the neighbourhood.
Gaps in the amenity mix may indicate areas of improvement or further investment, while strengths may show the main reasons people visit the neighbourhood.
Analyse the Amenities data set to answer questions like:
Does the neighbourhood provide a diversity of amenities to support the local needs?
What are the most important places and stakeholders?
Filter and access the complete list of stakeholder details including address, phone number, and website information.
Activity Trends:
Activity levels are determined by recording the total number of digital interactions within the neighbourhood over time. The higher levels of digital interactions correlate with visitation and use of the neighbourhood.
This month-on-month analysis enables a visual depiction of how the activity profile changes across a year.
Leverage Activity Trends to answer questions like:
How has activity changed since this time last year?
What lifestyle categories are driving activity in a neighbourhood?
Where are the opportunities to improve activation and increase visitation?
Have physical changes to the precinct, activation or economic drivers altered activity levels?
Explorer is available as a tool with our premium Amenities data set to filter places by amenity type, time of day and day of week
You can also create smaller precinct maps within the study area.
With an annual subscription to the Neighbourlytics platform you have access to Discover, where you can search any suburb in Australia and generate a Standard Insights Report for the highest activity area.
When you have a specific project geography or study area in mind, Extended Insights Reports offer the ability to control the geography, timing of the data capture and offer our premium lifestyle and amenities data sets.
Neighbourlytics taps into behavioural big data which is assented, aggregated and anonymised location data from mobile phones, public social media data, crowd sourced maps such as google maps, open street maps and finally we look at ratings and reviews.
Big data changes everyday or every month, however we need to look over a longer period of time, such as a quarter or a year in order to see trend.
When you purchase with Neighbourlytics we will include 12 months of historical data in your order, so that you can already see the lifestyle trend over time.
When you re-subscribe with us, we will refresh the data over the most recent year so that you can continue to track the lifestyle trends and impacts over time.
No. We take privacy seriously.
While social media monitoring tools track the activities of individuals to create consumer personas and behavioural predictions, we are looking to these digital sources to uncover how people interact with and value the places they live, work and play in.
Our data is de-identified and focuses on places rather than the behaviour of individual people.
This means we can't track what "types" of people are doing or saying, but rather we aggregate information across a particular geography to tell you about the neighbourhood.
A question that we often get asked, is what about people who are not on social media?
For example, maybe seniors aren’t on social media and children don’t have phones.
More people are active online than you might think.
Think about when you last:
Opened Google Maps?
Registered for an online event?
Checked or posted on a social media account?
All of this activity contributes to social data.
In Australia, there are 21.3 million people on social media every day, that’s 81% of the population and more people than are enrolled to vote.
What might surprise you is that Seniors over 65 are one of the greatest growth areas in the use of social media. Older Australians have experienced a considerable change in their digital habits.
Research from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) shows the number of people aged 75 and over who use social media doubled from 18 per cent in June 2019, to 41 per cent in June 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Seniors are engaging in a broader range of online activities, more frequently and across different devices.
Two types of data: Solicited and Unsolicited
When we look across the Neighbourlytics data set, we tap into two types of digital data, solicited data and unsolicited data.
The majority of the digital data points that we tap into are unsolicited, which means that if you have a cell phone and you exist in a local location, your data is going to be picked up in the broader data set anonymously.
The other type of data is solicited information, which means that it’s user-generated in some way that’s generated through things like user-generated maps (ie Google Maps), check-ins, likes, ratings and reviews or posting photos online.
How we reduce bias
It’s true that not everyone uses every social media platform. One of the ways that we reduce the bias is by tapping into multiple different platforms so that we’re covering all kinds of different lifestyle behaviours.
What we also know is that the vast majority of people carry a mobile phone and over 80 percent of people are on different social media channels. By looking at this wide variety of data sets, we’re able to capture the population level trends.
It’s true that there are individuals in any demographic who are not online, but what’s not true is that there is one total vertical missing.
In some areas of the population that we would expect to not be online, for example, children under 10, we can understand lifestyle patterns in a different way.
Asking the right questions about the lifestyle data set
Our question is not to understand what children post online because we hope they’re not. Our question is to understand how child-friendly this neighbourhood or place is.
If we’re asking that question, we can look at the carer data because it turns out that parents and caregivers post a lot about children online. And that gives us intelligence to understand where our child-friendly facilities are located and if it’s a family-friendly neighbourhood.
So, while the data set is quite comprehensive, it also comes down to asking the right questions about the lifestyle data set.
These days we are all using more and more data to drive evidence-based decision making.
So it's important to understand when Neighbourlytics fits in your broader data landscape.
You're probably already using data about the physical environment, perhaps that's building heights, property pricing, traffic information, you might also be using other human information such as demographic data, new and emerging data sets, such as Wi-Fi data and transactional data provide a different lens.
Neighbourlytics is different from all of these, but provides a complementary data set, that's the missing piece of the puzzle that brings it all together.
Physical information provides information about what we can see, that's a useful starting point.
Demographic information helps us understand who the residents are, but that data is often five years old and the demographic characteristics don't tell us about the buying preferences or the lifestyle behaviours.
Transactional information and Wi-Fi data are really good for looking internally inside your assets such as a retail center, but won't give you any context into the wider community that that place exists into. That's a rich opportunity of that local catchment area that you can tap into for further gain.
Lifestyle data is the missing piece of this puzzle, by tapping into the lifestyle behaviours, that's things like where people spend time, where they come from, where they go to, the places that are popular, the activities that they like to take part in, we can make all of our existing datasets richer and come to life.
For example, transaction data only tells us where people spend money, but many of the lifestyle activities that we enjoy in an experienced economy don't actually cost any money like having a picnic in the park with friends.
We need to understand the full breadth of lifestyle activities in a neighbourhood, if we are to create cities and developments that are fit for purpose which are going to generate the best sales and the best lifestyle outcome.
Presence & location data is mobile phone ping data and refers back to the visitation in & out of a neighbourhood as well as the dwell time within.
The way local people talk about their lives, and what they choose to post online about their experiences is a key indicator of local values.
By examining local chatter and photos at a neighbourhood level it is possible to gain insight into how people love to socialise, where they love to spend time, and what activities they love to spend time doing.
Important places are determined by assigning each place a relevance score.
The relevance score is created using online place interactions as a proxy to understand which assets are most important to the community.
Places data highlights the assets across a neighbouhood which are ranked by popularity, giving instant insight into what's important to local people. These data sets come from google places data.
Data privacy is something that we take very seriously in Neighbourlytics. The first thing to note is that the data that we tap into is aggregated and anonymised, this means that it's not personally identifiable in any way.
What we're interested in understanding is the general herd level activity patterns of where people spend time, where they come to, where they go from, at a neighbourhood level, but there's no way that we can re-identify that information back to an individual.
Equally when we're looking at lifestyle analysis and topic analysis, we use publicly available data from blogs, social media, ratings and reviews, to understand the key themes that are being posted about such as picnics in the park, dog walking, local cafes, we don't look at or attract any of the personal information or attributes attracted to that data.
This makes Neighbourlytics are very safe data set to handle and analyse because we're looking at the top line trends that occur in a local area without handling any personal information.
