Rubbish Neighbourhood Reports

dtl

I'm looking to move nearer to my work and thought that the neighbourhood reports from Upmystreet and Uklocalarea would be useful in narrowing down where to look. To test them however, I put in my own postcode. They were utterly rubbish with little or no bearing on reality.

Has anyone else tried these or other similar sites? What did you think of the results for your own area?

Jue_xx

Never used it, but just read your post so I put my postcode into upmystreet to have a look. Here is what it came up with:

"Often, many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will be low income, older people living in smaller semis. These are known as type 45 in the ACORN classification and 3.03% of the UK's population live in this type.

Neighbourhoods fitting this profile can be found across the country but main concentrations are in the West Midlands and the North East in towns such as Wolverhampton, Walsall and Dudley, Durham, Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland.
These typically council properties house an older population, many with significant health problems.

In these areas the retired are unlikely to have any pension provision beyond that provided by the state. Working people will be in routine jobs in shops, on the factory floor or in other manual occupations. This results in low incomes. Whether due to their age or previous work, a number of people suffer from long-term illness.

The housing is small, usually one or two bedrooms. It is generally rented from the council or housing association. Fewer than half of these households have a car of any sort.

With so little spare money, spending is limited to a funeral plan, playing bingo and the lottery, betting and going to the pub. These people are unlikely to be frequent high street shoppers, preferring to buy from catalogues by mail order. Leisure activities are similarly limited. Some may do a little gardening or go fishing. "

We're a full time working couple with 2 children living in a large 4 bed house nowhere near Dudley! We do not play bingo, have never been in a betting shop and have three cars between us (two are company cars).

However, I DO like gardening, so I must therefore fit the sterotype?!!

What a load of tosh!:rotfl::rotfl:

missile

Upmystreet for my location

The location you've entered is not classified by ACORN.

uklocalarea is bazare :eek:

very poor = in the bottom 10%

Most of the residents are DINK, with at least one posh car. The lowest sale price in the last 3 years was on 05.10.2009 @ £200+ :think: :whistle:

westv

I've found uklocalrea fairly accurate for the places I've checked it with.

not_loaded

Uklocalarea for me: far too vague. Seems to be based on averaging everything out to the point of being useless. Specifics like schools: useless, and transport: many mistakes.

Upmystreet: only really good for the schools section, population description far too vague, quite a lot of blatant advertising.

Overall view: a complete waste of time for assessing an area.

To paraphrase the above “a company WOULD waste their money targeting people using this sort of garbage”. No wonder we get so many irrelevant cold calls to our telephone preference number!

angryflashguy

Put these 2 postcodes into uklocalarea:
EN8 8EH
EN8 9AF

They have an apparent ranking difference of 15,000! I can tell you they're not *that* different!

There's not substitute for getting out on the road, checking the area out and asking people lots of questions!

Jue_xx

gingermingerr wrote: »

Actually, ACORN reports are very accurate indeed.



So yes, the UPMYSTREET ACORN information is VERY accurate.

Did you read my post at all?

MORPH3US

I have looked on UpMyStreet before and found it to be scarily accurate for me but then some of it is quite general.

On the whole though its never going to be right for everyone on the street.

bitemebankers

gingermingerr wrote: »

Companies pay thousands and thousands of pounds every year to market research companies to collect the data on neighbourhoods - so don't boo-hoo it!

Not really a sensible comparison, because companies are looking at an area very differently to a potential resident. To start with, they tend to look at areas as a whole rather than individual postcode areas so the individual errors and anomalies that people see on upmystreet.com average out. Secondly, they're looking at the data from a marketing perspective, the factors which are most important to them will not necessarily be important to someone living in the area.

Horizon81

Never looked on here before but what a laugh...

With money tight, food shopping might be in Aldi or Kwik Save. Clothes might be bought at Asda, New Look or frequently from catalogues.

Well there was until recently a recession on!!!

Jue_xx

......Sorry, was distracted there for a moment. I was just browsing my mail order catalogue for a new bingo pen.