"Nice house, bad street?": a Brit squeezes every street into one letter, and the extension is just its door handle
What it is A free extension for a UK property site: under every house on Rightmove it shows how good the street is (A+ to C), a click jumps to the site's street-colored map, and the deeper features require buying Pro.
Why it took off The founder compressed public data into one letter, which fits both search results and short-video covers. He then used Reddit self-promotion, rode the London Banana trend to make a Manchester T, which got him into the Daily Mail, TikTok commuter-town videos (up to 370k views), and sixteen thousand place-name SEO pages to pull house hunters onto the website.
BHow you could follow this Don't build another Rightmove extension in the UK. Pick a country that publishes government data openly and whose property portals don't grade neighbourhoods. Start with a street-rating map and place-name pages, get users through forum self-promotion, local-media data journalism, and short videos about "small towns X minutes from the city", charge for a weekly pass plus a one-time pass, and only build a portal extension last as a return-traffic channel.
342 users · rating 4.714285714285714 (7)
Liveable is a free Chrome extension that adds an A+ to C street grade under each listing in Rightmove's (the UK's largest property site) search results. The extension itself is small, with only 342 users as of early November. What's worth watching is the website behind it, liveable.co.uk: an independent developer named Andrew grades every street in England and Wales using free government open data, then used Reddit self-promotion, a viral map that got him into the Daily Mail, TikTok commuter-town videos, and sixteen thousand place-name pages to drive people to the paid Pro tier. This playbook would work in another country; the hard part is whether that country's data is as complete and as free as the UK's.
A 370k-view Sidcup video
In Feb 25 2026, the TikTok account @liveable.co.uk posted a video: "Sidcup is one of the few commuter towns in London where you can still buy a house for under £500k. Lovely high street, independent cafés, beautiful green spaces nearby, and 32 minutes to Cannon Street and Charing Cross." By Nov 6, it had 373k views and 1,417 shares.
The comments went to war. The most-liked was "32 minutes, just take a plane" (771 likes), second was "Sidcup isn't a commuter town, it's inside London" (307 likes), and a local said "I've been house hunting for two years, anything under £500k is either falling apart or in an area you wouldn't want to live in." Among them were the few comments this account actually wanted: "What website is the map in picture 5?" and "Where can I see that 'neighbour-friendly' map?"
Picture 5 is Liveable's street-colored map: green for good streets, red for bad ones.
What it actually is
The person behind it says it plainly on the /about page: 2025 years ago he needed to move, so he first built a spreadsheet of "good places to live", adding crime, green space, amenities, and price one by one. After picking a town, he realized he didn't know which side of it was good, so he had to ask on Reddit and "walk the street" on Google Street View, which took hours. So he spent about 6 months building this website. In the Manchester T press release he signed as Andrew Hammond, and the operating company is Searchbase Limited of Birmingham.
The method combines free data under the Open Government Licence (OGL): ONS census, police crime records, Ofsted school ratings, Land Registry sale prices, energy performance certificates, social housing, and HMO (shared house) registrations, into one grade: A+ outstanding, A excellent, B+ very good, B good, C+ fair, C problematic, colored street by street.
The extension launched on Jun 2026 25, and the official website only announced it on Aug 5; there have been no updates since July. It only works on rightmove.co.uk, showing the grade under each listing, and a click jumps back to Liveable's map. The extension's landing page headline is a single line: "Nice house, bad street?" Rightmove won't do this itself: the portal earns money from agents, so it can't give the street a listing sits on a C.
Where the money comes from
The extension is free; the money is collected on the website (liveable.co.uk/pricing, 11-06):
| Tier | Pricing | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | £0 | 3 street reports |
| Weekly pass | £7.99/week | "Just browsing" |
| Monthly pass | £12.99/month | "Moving soon" |
| 12-month pass | £39.99 one-time | Marked "limited time", no auto-renewal |
Pro unlocks the full-screen map, crime hotspots, nearby HMOs, noise, planning applications, a sale-price map, schools, commute times, and flood risk. In September and October he kept adding new layers (HMOs, social housing, all sale prices).
The weekly and monthly prices are exactly the same as those of the long-established UK area-research service Crystal Roof (£7.99 / £12.99), except the long tier has been replaced with a one-time purchase. House hunting is a matter of weeks, and paying £8 for one week is much easier to sell than a monthly subscription.
How many people pay and how much they make has never been disclosed, and you can't find it anywhere outside. A small detail: the "Coming soon" column on the pricing page still says "Rightmove extension", even though the extension has been live for three months. This person's attention is clearly not on the extension.
Where users come from
The extension's 342 users (Chrome Web Store, 11-01,4.71 ratings, 7 reviews) mostly came over from the website. Third-party extension stats sites show 1 172 in Sep and 6 358 in Nov, a doubling over two months, but the base is too small (unverified). Real acquisition happens on the website side, in four steps:
- Reddit self-promotion. In Sep 2025 25, he posted in r/HousingUK: "I've mapped the best (and worst) areas to buy or rent in every town", stressing free, no ads, no login, a side project. He then kept recommending it in the sub's "useful links" thread, noting "I made this".
- Riding a viral map for data PR. In summer 2025, a hand-drawn "London Banana" (the liveable London areas joined up look like a banana) went viral on X, and The Times even covered it. Liveable first made a data version of the banana with its own scores, then in October launched "Manchester T" (the liveable Manchester areas forming a T), written up as a standard press release opening with "Liveable.co.uk, the UK's leading local area insights platform". Result: the Manchester Evening News (10-11), Secret Manchester (10-14) and the Daily Mail (10-17) all covered it. A new site less than a month old picked up national media backlinks.
- TikTok commuter-town series. Posting on a regular schedule since February 2026, 40 videos, 5,936 followers (11-06). The format is almost fixed: a town outside London where you can still buy a home under £500k, how many minutes to which London station, with street-view footage and a Liveable map. Sidcup 373k, six towns within 30 minutes of King's Cross at £218k, Maidenhead £189k, Cheam £136k; the Nov 3 one had £62k. Shares run from a few hundred to a few thousand, the kind of video people send to a partner with "let's check out the weekend." An earlier version used "pick a house on Rightmove + postcode" and only got 10-20K views, so it was dropped.
- 16,000 place-name pages. The sitemap contains 63 city, 1,253 town, 2,949 suburb, 12,132 village, and 71 county pages, all titled with the same pattern: "<place name> - Best areas to live in 2026 (and areas to avoid map)". "Where not to live" is one of the most common searches among UK home buyers.
The site also has the Bing Ads conversion tracking tag installed, but whether they are running ads, and how much, can't be seen.
Who it's competing with
| Competitors | Form | Scale | Compared with Liveable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Property Tracker | Rightmove extension, 2010 | 30k users | Price history and tracking, no area focus |
| PaTMa / PropertyData / Propbar | Rightmove extension | about 10k users each | For investors and landlords: rental yield and sale price data |
| Area360 | Rightmove extension, 2024-12 | 9,000 users | Closest match: lists crime, deprivation, income and schools on listing pages, but gives no verdict |
| Property insights for Rightmove and Zoopla | Extension, 2024-11 | 570 users | Similar metrics, covers Zoopla too |
| Crystal Roof (2026-03 acquired StreetCheck) | Website | Long-established | More professional; its pricing was copied by Liveable |
| NestScope, Know My Postcode, HouseCheckup, OfferHound, etc. | Website / extension, 2026 | All small | Same public data, sold as "free" or as a one-time report |
The extension's data comes from the Chrome Web Store, first listed in November. This niche is already crowded in the UK and the bar is low: the data is free and anyone can get it. Liveable's difference from others isn't the data, it's two things: first, it gives a single letter, so you can rule out bad streets before clicking into search results; second, it puts its effort into distribution, while most others just build the data and leave it on display.
If it were you
In one line: B. The playbook is clear and learnable, and it doesn't rely on resources you can't get, but the UK local market is already crowded, revenue is undisclosed, and before moving to another country you need to confirm the data is sufficient.
Who it suits: 1–2 people who can build maps and data pipelines and write decent short-video scripts. Ideally you're in a country where a property portal is strong but nobody gives verdicts on neighborhoods, and where government open data exists at neighborhood level (crime, schools, census).
Who it doesn't suit: anyone wanting to build yet another Rightmove area extension in the UK (Area360 and others are already here, and another batch arrived in 2026 years, all with the same data); anyone wanting to do the US (Niche, NeighborhoodScout and AreaVibes already own that space, inferred); anyone expecting the extension alone to bring in users (Liveable's extension had 342 people after three-plus months).
How to do it: build the website first, not the extension. Combine public data into one grade, color the streets on a map, give every place name its own page, and copy the title pattern "best areas to live in (and areas to avoid)". Price to the home-buying cycle: a weekly pass plus a one-time long-term pass, priced against the most expensive local competitor. Once the map runs, build an extension that only shows grades for the largest local property portal, as a return funnel.
How to get users: do four things in order. Post once in local home-buying forums as "I made this, it's free"; find a "best city to live in" map meme that's trending online, make a version with your own data, write it up as a press release and send it to local media; publish two or three short videos a week on "X minutes from the city center, still buying a town for under Y", ending with a colored street map, and some commenters will ask "what is this site?"; and meanwhile fill every place-name page.
Timing: spring is peak home-buying season in many countries, so launching the map and place-name pages and starting video updates before February 2027 gives you time to catch it.
What would show you're wrong: ① within six months, liveable.co.uk stops shipping new features and TikTok stops updating, which means the business can't support one person; ② Rightmove or Zoopla launches its own neighborhood scores; ③ in the country you're targeting, place-name pages get no search traffic three months after launch, or the "X minutes from the city" video format gets under 10k views across 20 videos.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Area360 - Property Data Chrome 2024-12 9,000 users Lists multiple metrics on listing pages, including crime, deprivation, income and schools. Liveable gives a street grade right in the search results list. PaTMa Property Insights / Propbar / PropertyData Chrome 2018 / 2023 / 2018 about 10k users each Prices, rental yields and comparison data for investors and landlords. Does not judge whether a neighborhood is good. Property Tracker Chrome 2010 30k users Price history and listing tracking. Does not cover areas. Property insights for Rightmove and Zoopla Chrome 2024-11 570 users Also area metrics, but covers Zoopla too. No main site or brand content. Crystal Roof (including StreetCheck, acquired by 2026-03) Web Many years ago (unverified) An established UK area research provider (scale unverified) Data is more professional with national coverage. Liveable's weekly/monthly pricing is identical to it, but Liveable leans toward families, rankings and vibe tags, and adds a Rightmove extension. NestScope / Know My Postcode / HouseCheckup Web 2026 Unknown Sells free or one-time reports, pushing back on weekly passes. No PR or TikTok distribution like Liveable's. Rightmove and Zoopla include area information themselves Big-company features Already around The UK's largest property portal Only shows facts like schools, stations and sale prices, and does not grade the street a listing is on (because agents pay) - Where users come from
- Verified Founder self-promotion on Reddit: 2025-09-25 r/HousingUK, "I've mapped the best (and worst) areas to buy or rent in every town", then kept recommending it in the Useful links thread, noted as "I created"
- Verified Riding viral data PR / media: riding the viral London Banana from 2025-08, made a data version, and in October pushed Manchester T, covered by the Manchester Evening News (10-11), Secret Manchester (10-14) and the Daily Mail (10-17)
- Verified TikTok content: @liveable.co.uk has 40 videos on commuter towns and suburbs. Sidcup 373k views, six commuter towns 218k, Hitchin 211k
- Verified Programmatic SEO: the sitemap has about 16,500 place-name pages, all titled "Best areas to live in 2026 (and areas to avoid map)", with heavy search indexing
- Inferred Bing search ads: the pricing page has the Microsoft Ads UET pixel installed; the ad library doesn't track it, so the ad activity is unclear
- Verified Main site funnels to extension: the official /chrome-extension landing page and the 8-05 changelog promote the extension, and the extension funnels back to the main site's map paywall
Liveable — Area scores for Rightmove (Chrome extension) research report
Date 2026-11-06 · channel chrome · extension ID abjnhdilgfbohdogkbhmlknjeikdekbo · website liveable.co.uk · operator Searchbase Limited (UK company number 17146810, Birmingham)
One line
It's the free Chrome extension for liveable.co.uk (a map scoring which streets are good to live on in England and Wales). It adds an A+ to C street grade under each house in Rightmove search results. The extension itself is small (342 users) and only serves as an entry point funneling people to the paid Pro tier on the main site. The real success is the main site, driven by independent developer Andrew's content playbook: Reddit self-promotion → riding the "London Banana" hype for data PR, landing in the Daily Mail and Manchester Evening News → TikTok commuter-town videos → programmatic SEO pages for about 16k place names.
1. Basic data
| Project | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Extension users | 342, rating 4.71 (7 reviews) | Chrome store library item_snap 2026-11-01 |
| Extension listed | 2026-06-25; the official site only announced it in Aug 5 | Library; liveable.co.uk/updates |
| User curve | 9/1 172 → 11/6 358, +94 over the last 30 days (recall-era extops; we did not verify this independently; the library only has 1 snapshots) | Data card recall |
| Permissions | Only active on rightmove.co.uk; only sends the property location to get the score | liveable.co.uk/chrome-extension |
| Main site launched | Founder started building in 2025, launched after about 6 months; 2025-09-25 first self-promoted on r/HousingUK | /about; Reddit (Brave search snippet) |
| Paid | Free 3 street reports; Pro £7.99/week, £12.99/month, £39.99 for a year (one-time, "limited time") | liveable.co.uk/pricing |
| Programmatic SEO pages | 63 cities, 1,253 towns, 2,949 suburbs, 12,132 villages, 71 counties, about 16,500 pages total | liveable.co.uk/sitemap-*.xml, 2026-11-06 crawls |
| TikTok | @liveable.co.uk, 5,936 followers, 40 posts, 46.7k likes total | TikHub 2026-11-06 |
2. Competitors
Rightmove extensions in this slot are crowded, all "stuffing data into the listing page" (data from chromestore library 2026-11-01):
- Property Tracker (30k users, 2010 years): price history and tracking, no area focus.
- PaTMa Property Insights (10k, 2018), PropertyData (10k, 2018), Propbar (10k, 2023): aimed at investors and landlords, covering rental yield, sold prices, and comparables.
- Area360 (9,000,2024-12): shows crime, deprivation index, income, schools, and parks on listing pages. Closest to Liveable, but it gives a pile of metrics, not a single grade.
- Property insights for Rightmove and Zoopla (570,2024-11): deprivation, income, crime, schools.
- Newcomers in 2026: OfferHound (price comparison, EPC, flood risk, planning, negotiation leverage), PropertyEngine (118,2026-10), HouseLens (25,2026-06), RightAmp (27), Property Wizard (200), and others, mostly data mashups built in the AI era.
Web and big-player level:
- Crystal Roof (crystalroof.co.uk): an established UK area-research tool that acquired StreetCheck in March 2026. Pricing is £7.99/week, £12.99/month, £29.99/3 for 2026-09 months (compiled by housecheckup.co.uk). Liveable's weekly and monthly prices are identical, clearly benchmarked against them, except it swaps the longer plan for a one-time £39.99 annual purchase.
- Locrating (mainly school catchments, also a listing portal extension), the official police.uk crime map, CrimeRate, the ADT crime map, and other free tools.
- A batch of "free area report" sites that appeared in 2026: NestScope (0–100 area scores, positioned against Crystal Roof's "no weekly pass"), Know My Postcode, HouseCheckup (£9.99/£24.99 manually reviewed reports), Xploria.
- Rightmove / Zoopla themselves: listing pages show basic information such as schools, stations, and sold prices, but they don't pass judgment on whether a street is good or bad (portals depend on agent payments and won't grade the street a listing sits on C).
3. Growth tactics (evidence)
- Reddit founder self-promotion (confirmed): 2025-09-25 on r/HousingUK, posting "I've mapped the best (and worst) areas to buy or rent in every town", emphasizing "free, no ads, no login, side project" (Brave/Jina search snippets; Reddit body text was blocked by 403, engagement not verified). Later kept recommending it in r/HousingUK's "Useful links for house buying" thread with a "Disclaimer: I created" framing.
- Data PR riding a trend (confirmed, the key move): in August 2025, Saul Sadka's hand-drawn "London Banana" map on X went viral (the Times and Wandsworth Guardian both covered it). In September 15, Liveable made a "data version of the London Banana" page using its own scores, then in October launched "Manchester T", written in press-release tone ("the UK's leading platform for local area insights"). Result: Manchester Evening News (2025-10-11), Secret Manchester (10-14), and Daily Mail (10-17) all covered it, and r/manchester had a discussion thread. This wave brought the new site media backlinks and brand awareness. They later also made a London Commuter Map.
- TikTok content (confirmed): @liveable.co.uk began posting regularly around February 2026, with a fixed theme of "London commuter towns and suburbs where you can still buy homes under £500k", paired with street scenes and Liveable grades. Top video: Sidcup at 373k views (2026-02-25); Bexleyheath 195k, Banstead 194k, Maidenhead 189k, Hitchin 211k, "six commuter towns" 218k (10-17); recent weeks still 62k and 40k. Share counts are high (many 300–1,400), suggesting people forward them to partners and family to "look at houses together". Early on they also tried a "pick a house on Rightmove + postcode" format, which performed poorly (1–20k views), and they dropped it.
- Programmatic SEO (confirmed): about 16k place pages, all titled "<place> - Best areas to live in 2026 (and areas to avoid map)", largely indexed by search engines (nearly all Exa/Jina search results are these pages). "Areas to avoid" targets a term UK homebuyers search constantly.
- Search ads (possible, unconfirmed): the pricing page carries a Microsoft Ads (Bing UET, bat.bing.com) tracking pixel, so at least Bing ad conversion tracking is installed. Our ad library doesn't track this product, so whether they're running ads, and how much, is unknown.
- Extension as its own funnel: the site has a standalone landing page at /chrome-extension, promoted in the changelog; the extension in turn sends users one click back to the main site's map (where the paywall sits). The extension alone gets limited traffic from store searches for "Rightmove"; users mostly arrive from the main site and TikTok.
4. Why it took off
- Real pain point, valuable use case: UK homebuyers can browse houses on Rightmove but can't tell whether a street is any good. The traditional workaround is asking on Reddit and walking the street on Google Street View, which is slow. The founder house-hunted this way himself (/about). A home purchase costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, so spending £7.99 for a week of data is a small decision.
- Compressing complex data into one letter: ONS, police, Ofsted, Land Registry, EPC, social housing registers, HMO registers, and other public data (OGL licensed, free) are combined into a single A+ to C grade, colored by street or hexagon. That one letter fits well on a TikTok cover and under every listing in Rightmove search results.
- Shareable format: "45 minutes outside London, houses under £500k, village-feel towns" is a real need for young UK families, and the videos get shared heavily.
- Timing: the viral London Banana gave a ready-made topic hook. Liveable was among the first to "recreate" it with data and extend it to Manchester, and the media followed.
- Pricing directly copies the proven Crystal Roof weekly-pass model: house-hunting is short-term, high-intensity demand, so weekly and one-time annual passes sell better than monthly subscriptions.
5. Differentiation
- Compared with extensions like Area360, Property Insights, and PaTMa: others list a pile of metrics on individual listing pages, while Liveable puts one grade under each result in the search results list, letting people rule out "nice house, bad street" before clicking. Also, others treat the extension as the product, while Liveable treats the website plus map as the product and the extension as the entry point.
- Compared with web tools like Crystal Roof: it's aimed more at ordinary families (vibe tags like "Coffee in the Park" and "Young Families", a ranked-list homepage, a street-colored map), and the pricing structure is essentially the same.
- Did differentiation alone drive it? Only partly. "One grade plus street-level coloring" makes both the content and the extension easy to share, which is a prerequisite for the growth playbook to work. But what actually brought people in were distribution moves: PR, TikTok, and SEO. The extension has only 342 users, which suggests the differentiator of "showing a grade inside Rightmove" hasn't pulled in much on its own.
6. Visibility
It's circulating in small circles. The main site was featured by the Daily Mail and the Manchester evening paper in October 2025 thanks to Manchester T, and its top TikTok video hit 370k views. But revenue isn't public (nothing on TrustMRR or X; x-radar found 0 results for "liveable.co.uk" over the past 180 days). There's no coverage in startup or indie dev circles. The extension itself is barely known.
7. Copycats
Found no direct copies of Liveable. But the UK "area reports / Rightmove extension" category has many newcomers in 2026 (NestScope, Know My Postcode, HouseCheckup, OfferHound, PropertyEngine, HouseLens, and others), all working from the same OGL public data, so the barrier to entry is low.
8. What to borrow
- Public government data (OGL) plus a one-letter score = a low-cost content engine that can scale long-tail SEO pages and short videos indefinitely.
- Take a meme that's trending online (the London Banana), redo it with your own data, write it up as a press release, and earn coverage and backlinks from national media.
- Build a lightweight extension on a big platform people already use (Rightmove) that shows only a grade, and keep the deeper features behind a paywall on your own site.
- For short-term, high-intensity needs like house-hunting, school search, and renovation, one-time annual passes or weekly passes sell better than monthly subscriptions. Price directly against the category leader.
9. Still unclear
- Main site traffic, Pro paying users, and revenue are unknown (Similarweb can't capture them).
- The extension's user growth curve comes only from extops cited in recall, not independently verified; our library has only one snapshot, 2026-11-01.
- Whether they're running Bing/Google ads, and how much, is unknown (only the Bing UET pixel was seen).
- The Reddit post's actual engagement (upvotes, comments) was hidden behind 403 and couldn't be seen.
- The extension hasn't been updated since July, so the founder may have shifted focus to the main site (9 through October added HMO, social housing, and sold-price maps). It looks that way.
Sources
- Chrome Web Store page chromewebstore.google.com/detail/liveable-%E2%80%94-area-sco…; chromestore library item / item_snap (2026-11-01)
- www.liveable.co.uk/, /pricing, /updates, /about, /chrome-extension, /the-london-banana, /the-manchester-t, /terms-and-conditions, sitemap-*.xml (2026-11-06 crawls)
- Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/HousingUK/comments/1npan2v/ (2025-09-25), www.reddit.com/r/HousingUK/comments/1r1xcgu/, www.reddit.com/r/manchester/comments/1o5dvnd/ (2025-10-13) (all search snippets)
- Media: www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news… (2025-10-11), www.dailymail.com/news/article-15191539/live-Manchester-T-vi… (2025-10-17), secretmanchester.com/manchester-t-most-liveable-areas/ (2025-10-14)
- London Banana background: www.remitly.com/blog/en-gb/culture/what-is-the-london-banana… , www.thetimes.com/uk/london/article/banana-map-zone-area-meme…
- TikTok:TikHub handler_user_profile / fetch_user_post_videos,unique_id=liveable.co.uk(2026-11-06)
- Crystal Roof pricing: housecheckup.co.uk/compare/crystalroof (2026-09); StreetCheck acquired: crimemapsuk.com/articles/what-happened-to-streetcheck/
- Competitors expanding: Chrome Store catalog (Property Tracker, PaTMa, Propbar, PropertyData, Area360, etc.)