If you’ve ever tried to compare areas while house-hunting, you know the pain: ten browser tabs open, a school checker in one, Google Street view in another, guessing randomly at just how noisy that street ‘feels.’

That’s because property portals only allow you to search by the features of a home itself. Yet the neighbourhood is the thing that quietly runs your life. The school run, the noise from the main road, whether there’s a pub or a supermarket within walking distance, whether your street is leafy or loud. These things make or break whether a home is right for you.

Until now, none of that was searchable. You had to manually research around every property you were interested in. Today, that changes.

Jitty’s new Neighbourhood Features makes the area itself — the real, lived experience of a place — fully searchable for the first time in the UK.

Why Neighbourhoods Were Invisible in Search

Property portals give you the basics like number of bedrooms, bathrooms, price, and maybe a handful of filters. If you’re lucky, a listing page might mention a nearby school or distance to a train station.

But everything that shapes your daily life you’ve had to piece it together yourself.

• Is the street quiet?
• Is there a nursery within walking distance?
• How far is the nearest supermarket, pub, or park?
• Is the area child-friendly? Leafy?

These are the questions that actually change whether a property is right for you and your family. But answering them has always entailed effort and guesswork.

Making Neighbourhood Data Searchable

With new partnerships from Crystal Roof (schools, amenities, green spaces, quietness) and Nuuri (nurseries), we’re bringing real neighbourhood-level context directly into search.

You can now filter homes by the things that really matter:

• Good or outstanding schools nearby
• Nurseries within walking distance
• Shops or supermarkets close by
• Nearby pubs
• Green, leafy areas with parks
• Quiet streets away from busy roads

Describe what you want in natural language or use filters and Jitty will find homes in areas that match your lifestyle.

How Area-Based Search Changes Home Hunting

Property search used to start with:

“Show me all the 3-beds between £350k and £450k.”

Now it can start with:

“Show me 3-bed homes under £450k in a quiet, leafy area within a 10 minute walk of a good primary school and a nursery.”

This is a big, unique change for property search in the UK:

• Area-agnostic buyers can now make sense of places they’ve never visited.
• Families can instantly compare school and nursery proximity.
• First-time buyers can evaluate walkability without 30 minutes spent triangulating on Google Maps.
• You can avoid noisy main roads, isolated estates, or patchy-amenity pockets.
• And you can combine lifestyle factors with property criteria in ways no other portal supports.

Why No Other Portal Offers Neighbourhood Search

Portals have sprinkled neighbourhood information around for years — a school icon here, a station pin there — but it’s always been decoration on a listing page, not something you can actually search with.

Why? Because it threatens their core business model.

Making neighbourhood factors searchable would fundamentally reorder their results. If a buyer searches:

• “quiet streets”
• “good nurseries nearby”
• “walkable shops”

…the platform would need to push relevant homes to the top, even if those homes aren’t the ones paying agents the highest fees.

Traditional portals make their money from estate agents, not buyers. Anything that reshuffles results based on buyer needs is risky: it changes visibility, reduces click-throughs, and ultimately threatens revenue.

So neighbourhood information stays where it’s “safe,” on the listing rather than in the search.

Jitty can do what they can’t

We don’t sell ranking positions to agents, so we can do the thing that benefits buyers. Like make neighbourhood criteria first-class search filters.

It’s a new organising principle for property search, one built around the buyer rather than a business model created in the 2000s.

How This Fits Into Jitty’s Vision

Neighbourhood Features is the final layer in a new model of property search.

1. AI-derived property data - We extracted dozens of extra data points about each home via photos, floorplans and descriptions, so we understand each property on the market better than anyone else.

2. Natural-language search - Then we let people describe what they want in plain English.

3. Neighbourhood intelligence

Now we’ve added the third layer, the context around the home. Schools, nurseries, quiet streets, green spaces, walkability, all now searchable

Why this matters

For the first time, property search understands three things at once:

• the home at an unmatched level of detail
• the buyer’s intent via natural language search
• the neighbourhood around the property

This is why Neighbourhood Features feels like such a leap: it connects property, lifestyle, and intent into one system and gives buyers results that reflect how they make decisions in the real world.

Final Thoughts: The Future of Property Search

For decades, property portals have asked buyers to choose a home without understanding the place around it. They’ve forced you to make six-figure decisions with partial information.

Neighbourhood Features is a step towards fixing that.

It turns the area into something you can actually search for. And once you’ve searched this way you won’t go back.

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