How we score a locality, and what we refuse to fake
Where our numbers come from, and why some of them are blank on purpose.
People ask, reasonably, why they should trust a water reading or a safety note from a young company they have never heard of. Fair question. Here is the honest answer.
Every area reading is built from more than one direction: public records where they exist, checks on the ground that no dataset contains, and what residents say. When the sources disagree, we do not average the disagreement into a smooth number. The disagreement is the information, and the report says so.
What we will not do
- Invent a figure to fill a gap. If we do not hold a reading, the report shows a blank and says it is a blank.
- Hide the uncertainty. Where a reading is thin, it is flagged as thin, so you know how much weight it can carry.
- Let anyone pay to move a score. There is no price for a better number. There never will be.
A blank looks worse on a marketing page than a bold confident number, and a rival will always happily print the confident number. We think the blank is better for you, because a made-up figure you cannot check is exactly what got this industry its reputation.
The same honesty rule runs through the community. Our own account asks questions openly under the Locara name. It never writes answers, and it never pretends to be a resident. What residents say stays theirs.
A score you cannot trust is worse than no score at all.