Getting started

On your phone? You can install The First Move onto your home screen without going anywhere near an app store.

• iPhone (Safari): tap the Share icon, then "Add to Home Screen".
• Android (Chrome): tap the three-dot menu, then "Add to Home screen" or "Install app".

It opens full-screen, without the browser address bar, and works the same as any other app on your phone.

Buying a house for the first time comes with enough to think about, so signing up is kept deliberately simple. Account creation and sign-in are handled by Clerk, a dedicated authentication provider, meaning your login details are never stored on our own servers.

You can create an account with an email address and password, or sign in instantly with your Google account. Either way, you will need to provide a first name and last name, since these are used to identify you if you ever link accounts with a partner to plan a house purchase together.

Once signed in, you can update your profile picture at any time from your profile, covered in more detail next. No credit card is required to create an account or to use the free tier.

The first time you sign in, a short mandatory onboarding walkthrough asks for the numbers that power everything else in the app. It takes a couple of minutes, and everything you enter can be changed later, so there is no pressure to get it perfect on the first pass. The walkthrough covers:

• Location: optionally, roughly where in England you are house hunting, so the map centres there.
• Finances: your monthly take-home pay and an ideal leftover percentage are required, since these two numbers are what every affordability score is built on. Annual income is optional and not currently factored into any calculation; it is captured for future features around lender affordability estimates.
• Mortgage defaults: your interest rate and mortgage term, set once as a baseline that automatically applies to every property you add. You can override either value on a specific property later, covered in a future part of this guide.
• Deposit: how much you have, and where it is coming from, whether that is savings, a gift, investments, a property sale, an inheritance, or a mix of sources. You can add multiple sources, each with its own amount and an optional note, and they are totalled up automatically. A Lifetime ISA counts as savings, add a note to say so.
• Bill defaults: your own default bill amounts for gas and electricity, water, broadband, and groceries, applied to every property the same way the mortgage defaults are. Pitch them high, at the most you would expect to pay rather than the least. They are predictions nobody can check for you, and because they land on everything at once, a hopeful figure quietly makes every property look more affordable than it really is. You can always bring one down on a specific house later.
• Monthly commitments: any other regular outgoings you want factored into your affordability score, such as a Netflix subscription, house insurance estimates, or a holiday fund. Like bill defaults, these can also be overridden per property, which is useful for experimenting with what you could realistically sacrifice. For example, you might normally put £500 a month into a holiday fund, but for a specific property, you could see that dropping it to £400 is what makes the numbers work.
• Places: anywhere you would like to stay close to, such as work or family, along with how long you are happy to commute. These drive the location part of every score, 35% of the final number, so they are worth a minute of thought, see important places and commutes.
• Legal: a final required step, since by this point you have entered your income, take-home pay, and where your deposit is coming from. You need to tick a box confirming you have read the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy before onboarding completes, both linked directly from that step so you do not have to go hunting for them.

Once onboarding is done you are ready to go, and none of it is set in stone. Your income, your deposit, the bills and your leftover target can all be changed from your profile whenever your plans shift, which for most people is more often than they expect.