Ad Disclosure

No advertising currently runs on this site. This page states the rules that will govern it when it does, including where ads will never appear and which advertisers we will block.

Where things stand today

No advertising runs on this site. There is no ad network, no sponsored content, no affiliate link, and no paid placement anywhere in the guide as of the date above. Nothing you read here has been paid for by anyone.

We are publishing this page before there is anything to disclose, because the rules are easier to hold to when they are written down in advance.

What will change, and what will not

Advertising is the intended way this guide pays for itself. When it goes live, the following rules apply and this page will be updated to say that it has.

What will not change under any circumstances:

  • Editorial independence. No advertiser gets to influence a rating, a ranking, a price figure, or whether a neighborhood is described honestly. If a neighborhood has no grocery store, a steep commute, or a flood history, the page says so regardless of who is buying inventory next to it.
  • No paid placement in editorial. Neighborhoods, amenities and articles are never ranked, included or excluded for money. If that ever changes for a specific piece, it will carry a clear label at the top, and it will be the exception rather than a quiet practice.
  • No advertorial disguised as editorial. Anything sponsored will be labelled as sponsored, in the piece, not in a footer.

Where ads will and will not appear

When advertising is live:

Ads will never appear:

  • Above the first block of content on any page.
  • Inside or adjacent to a lead form, where an ad could be mistaken for part of the form.
  • On conversion pages: buyer and seller resources, the home valuation page, the agent and contact pages.
  • On the map explorer.

Ads will be limited:

  • A maximum of three ad units on any page.
  • Amenity pages and articles carry the most permissive placement, roughly one in-feed unit per eight to ten items.
  • Ad slots have reserved dimensions in the page layout so that loading an ad does not shift the content you are reading. That is a usability commitment as much as a technical one.

Consent: advertising will sit behind the same first-party consent banner that already gates analytics. If you decline, no ad script will load and no advertising cookie will be set, in exactly the way analytics behaves today.

Categories we will block:

  • Competing real-estate brokerages and agent-lead products, because a guide that sends you to a competitor's lead funnel while claiming to be independent is not independent.
  • We will also block categories that are predatory in a housing context where the ad platform allows that level of control.

Why we are telling you this

The value of this guide is that it is honest about places, including their downsides. That is worth nothing if a reader has to wonder whether a paragraph was bought. The purpose of this page is to make the answer checkable rather than a matter of trust.

If you see something on this site that looks like paid placement and is not labelled, tell us. If we got it wrong we will fix it and say so.