Important places and commutes

Important places live in the Places section of your profile. Onboarding asks for them when you first sign up, though you are never stuck with whatever you typed in that day, since you can add, edit and remove them whenever your life shifts around.

1. 1
   Open the Places section of your profile and use the add button.
2. 2
   Pick a type (work, family, school, transport, or other), and give it a name you will recognise later, such as "Office" or "Mum and Dad".
3. 3
   Search for its address or postcode. If the pin does not land quite right, drag it to the exact spot, the same way you would when adding a property.
4. 4
   Set how long you are happy to spend getting there, by drive, on foot, or both. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that matters most.
5. 5
   Save. Every property you are tracking is remeasured against the new place automatically, so you do not need to revisit them one by one.

Removing a place is just as immediate. It disappears from your map and from every property’s commute list, and the scores recalculate without it.

Every place is one of five types: work, family, school, transport, or other. The type is purely organisational and only groups your places sensibly in a property’s commute list, under a heading with a matching icon. On the map they are coloured by whose they are rather than by type, so purple is yours and teal belongs to a linked partner.

It does not change how much a place counts. A school is weighted exactly the same as a gym you labelled "other". Every place you save counts equally towards your location score, so it is worth saving the places you genuinely care about being near, rather than everywhere you occasionally go.

Each place carries two separate targets, an ideal drive time running from 5 minutes up to 2 hours and an ideal walktime from 5 minutes up to 1 hour, both in 5-minute steps. They are not limits and nothing gets filtered out for being too far away. Think of them as the yardstick each property’s real travel time is held against.

You do not need to set both. If you would only ever drive to work, set a drive time and leave the walk on "Any". Where you set both, whichever one puts the property in a better light is the one that counts, so a place you could drive to in 10 minutes is not dragged down by an hour-long walk you would never actually make.

Once a place has a target, The First Move measures the real drive and walk time from every property you are tracking to that place, and scores each one against your target. Hitting your ideal time exactly scores 80 out of 100, beating it climbs towards 100, and going over it tails off gradually rather than falling off a cliff. With several places saved, your location score is the plain average across all of them, and that average is 35% of the property’s final score. The full formula is on the scoring page.

Your places then turn up all over the app. They appear as labelled pins on the map, in the Commutes tab of every property with each real travel time set against your goal, in a property’s quick-view panel where you can draw the actual route onto the map, and as a count on your dashboard.

If you have a linked partner, you each keep your own places and your own targets. Their commute to their office is scored into their score, yours into yours, and the combined score averages the two. Neither of you has to compromise on a single shared list of places.

Sitting just above your places is your search area, meaning the town or region you are hunting in. This one plays no part in any score. All it does is tell the map where to open, so you land on the area you are actually searching rather than a default view of the whole country, and it gives you a button to fly back there once you have wandered off somewhere else.

You can leave it unset, and the map will still work perfectly well. It is a convenience, not a requirement.