LocalFamilyHub is a directory built for one job: helping families find services near them, fast. Not a national list with a search bar bolted on, but a suburb-by-suburb guide to childcare, swim schools, dentists, tutors, and everything else a family needs close to home.
We started in Auckland, building the directory suburb by suburb rather than trying to cover the whole country at once. That’s deliberate. A directory that lists every childcare centre in New Zealand but knows nothing about Remuera specifically isn’t actually useful to a parent in Remuera. We’d rather go deep on fewer suburbs than shallow on all of them.
The site is built to expand suburb by suburb, city by city, and eventually country by country, but every new area only goes live once it meets the same bar for listing depth and accuracy as the ones before it.
How we build the directory
Listings are checked against government and professional organisation registers where one exists. For childcare and early education, for example, our New Zealand listings draw on the Ministry of Education’s Early Childhood Education directory, a government-maintained dataset updated nightly. For regulated services such as dental, medical, or midwifery care, listings are checked against the relevant professional register, such as the Dental Council of New Zealand or the Midwifery Council of New Zealand. Where no register applies, listings are researched and added manually, suburb by suburb, drawing on publicly available business information. [Link the word “registers” to /how-we-verify-listings/ once that page is live.]
Businesses can also submit their own listing directly. Every submission is reviewed before it goes live, and where a relevant register exists, we check submitted details against it the same way we do for listings we’ve added ourselves.
Every listing is checked against its suburb before publication. We don’t publish thin suburb pages. If a suburb doesn’t yet have enough verified listings in a category to be genuinely useful, that category page stays unpublished until it does.
Featured listings
LocalFamilyHub offers paid packages for businesses that want a featured spot within their category, clearly marked as such. Payment covers visibility, not verification or ranking: whether a business appears in our standard category results, and where it sits within them, is never for sale. Featured and non-featured listings go through the same review process before they’re published.
What we don't do
We don’t publish reviews we haven’t sourced from genuine channels. We don’t let payment affect whether a listing is verified or how it ranks in standard, non-featured results. Where we haven’t been able to verify a detail, we say so rather than guessing.
Coverage
LocalFamilyHub launched in Auckland, New Zealand, and we’re building the directory suburb by suburb from there. Auckland is our starting point, not our ceiling: we’re expanding to other New Zealand cities, and from there to Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Each new city or country goes live only once it meets the same standard for listing depth and verification as Auckland does today. Currently we cover a growing number of suburbs across Auckland, with new ones being added weekly See our Locations page for the latest.
Get in touch
Have a question, spotted something that needs correcting, or want to know when we launch in your area? Visit our Contact page and send us a message. we read every message and love t hear from you.