We got the city right and the neighborhood wrong. So we built the tool we wish we'd had.
Brigham Redd founded SettleSavvy after a cross-country move taught him that choosing where to live is really about choosing which street to live on.
The move
When Brigham and his wife moved from Provo to Las Vegas, they did what most people do. They picked the city, then picked a place that made daily life easy. Her grad program was the anchor, so they found a nice-looking apartment complex close enough for her to bike to campus. On paper it was perfect.
It took about a week to realize the complex sat on the edge of a part of town dealing with real problems with crime and homelessness. They had researched the city for months and the block for about an afternoon. Everything that mattered day to day, how it felt to walk home, whether they relaxed when they stepped outside, came down to a few streets they'd never thought to look into.
The fix
Two years later they moved again, this time across the valley. The commute got a little longer. Everything else got better. The new neighborhood was walkable, close to parks, and safe in a way they felt the moment they arrived. With a young family, that feeling wasn't a luxury. It was the whole point.
The difference between the two homes wasn't the city. It was the neighborhood, and the fact that nobody had given them a straightforward way to tell the two apart before they signed a lease.
Two moves, one lesson
Brigham wasn't the only one in the family who'd learned this the hard way. His cousin and inspiration, James White, faced the same decision when he moved his family across the country for a PhD program. James spent more than 100 hours researching neighborhoods to get it right.
Not everyone around him had that time. One of his program fellows ended up leaving the program early after his family landed in a neighborhood where they didn't feel at home.
Two moves, two very different outcomes, and the same lesson: the neighborhood decides how a move feels.
That's when SettleSavvy stopped being an idea and became something they had to build.
Why SettleSavvy exists
Brigham kept coming back to the same gap. There are endless tools to help you pick a city and endless listings to help you pick a house. There was almost nothing to help you judge the few blocks in between, on the things people actually care about: safety, schools, who your neighbors are, how far you really are from the life you want.
The idea took shape over three years of conversations with family who'd made the same kind of move, and was sharpened with James. The hundred hours he once spent researching his own move have since become more than a thousand spent building the data models behind every metric.
SettleSavvy turns that research into something anyone can do in an evening. You tell it what matters to you, and it compares neighborhoods on your priorities, not a generic “best of” list. Today it covers 918 metros across the US and has helped more than 5,000 people look before they leap.
You can renovate the kitchen. You can't renovate the block. I learned that the expensive way, and I don't think anyone else should have to.
What Brigham believes
Ask Brigham what he wants SettleSavvy to stand for and the answer is simple. He believes there's a neighborhood match in every metro, a place where you can feel at home quickly, and that finding it shouldn't come down to luck or a hundred hours you don't have. That belief is the reason the product leads with how a place feels to live in, not just what it costs.
- metros covered
- 918
- people helped
- 5,000+
- hours building our data models
- 1,000+
- move that started it all
- 1
Find the neighborhood that fits your life.
Start with the priorities that matter to you and see how the blocks compare.