How your suitability score works

The final score is a weighted blend of 65% affordability and 35% location fit. That weighting is deliberate and it is fixed, so a beautiful commute cannot rescue a property you cannot actually afford. Money carries almost twice the weight of location in the final number.

One hard rule sits above the weighting entirely. If your leftover income after this property would be zero or negative, the whole score is forced to 0 however good the commute might be. An unaffordable property is not a 60% good property with a few issues, it is a hard no.

This half of the score compares your actual leftover income after this property’s costs against your ideal leftover target, set in your profile. Hitting your target exactly scores 80, the same baseline hitting an ideal commute time earns, so “on target” means one thing across the whole score rather than two.

Beating your target earns a bonus on top, climbing from 80 towards a full 100 as your leftover approaches double the target you set. That bonus exists because clearing your target is not the end of the story. A home that leaves you a quarter of your income spare and one that leaves you two thirds are both affordable, but they are not the same decision, and a score that called them both 100 was throwing that difference away.

Falling short scores on a curve rather than a straight line, so reaching 80% of your target gets you 51 instead of 64, and reaching half your target gets you 20 instead of 40. The formula is your leftover as a percentage of target, squared, times 79, which meets the 80 baseline exactly at your target so there is no jump at the boundary.

That squaring is the important part. It means small shortfalls are forgiven fairly gently, but the score falls away quickly as you drift further from your target, on purpose, since in practice the financial pressure of being under target compounds rather than growing in a straight line. Fall to zero or negative leftover and, per the rule above, the entire property scores 0.

This half looks at every important place you saved in your profile, whether that is work or family or a school, and compares the real drive and walk time to each one against the ideal time you set for it.

Whichever mode scores higher is the one that wins. If you would drive to work but could walk it at a push, the place is scored on whichever of the two puts it in a better light rather than being averaged down by the slower option. Hitting your ideal time exactly scores 80, beating it scales up towards 100, and going over does not fall off a cliff so much as decay gradually the further over you get.

With more than one place saved, the location fit score is a simple average across all of them. Every place counts equally, whatever type you gave it.

If nothing can be scored on location, location fit is left out of the equation entirely, rather than defaulting to some assumed value, and the property is scored on affordability alone. That happens if you have saved no important places, and it also happens if the places you have saved carry no ideal time, since there is then no target to measure their real travel times against. Worth knowing, since a place with no ideal time still appears on your map and still shows its drive and walk times while quietly counting for nothing at all.

If you have linked a partner account, you each get your own score, measured against your own take-home pay, your own commitments, your own share of the costs, and your own ideal leftover target. The combined score shown alongside them is a plain average of the two, nothing more elaborate.

Deposits are the exception, and they work differently from everything else. Rather than each of you being scored against your own savings, both deposits are pooled into a single figure and taken off the purchase price, and the mortgage that remains is the one used in both of your scores. That is the honest way round, since you would be buying the house together with the money together, but it does mean your own score improves when your partner adds to their deposit, not just when you add to yours.

Every score comes with a plain-English label alongside the number, so you are never left decoding a raw percentage on its own.

• 90 and above: “Excellent fit”
• 80 to 89: “Great fit”
• 60 to 79: “Good fit”
• 40 to 59: “Tight fit”
• Below 40: “Stretched”

The 80 mark is not an arbitrary cutoff. It is exactly what a property scores when it hits your targets, on both halves of the score, so “Great fit” means precisely that you got what you asked for. Everything above it is a property doing better than you asked, which is why the top of the range earns its own label rather than lumping a home that just met your target in with one that comfortably beat it.

The ring around the score is colour-coded too, turning green at 80 and above, amber from 60 up to 80, and red below 60. There are deliberately only three colours against five labels: the colour is there to answer “is this one worth considering?” at a glance, and the label fills in how comfortably.