When you start the intake at OurNextCity, you cannot see your partner's answers, and they cannot see yours, until you have both finished. People sometimes find this strange. They are planning a move together, after all, and hiding things from each other feels like the opposite of how a partnership should work. But this single design choice does more to produce a fair result than almost anything else we do, and the reason comes down to a well-documented quirk of how people make judgements.
The quiet pull of anchoring
Anchoring is the tendency to lean on the first number or opinion you encounter, even when you know it is arbitrary. Once a figure is in the room, every subsequent judgement drifts toward it. It is one of the most robust findings in decision research, and it does not switch off just because you are aware of it.
In a relocation decision, the anchors are everywhere. If one partner says a comfortable budget is 4,000 a month, the other rarely answers the question freshly. They adjust from 4,000. If one says they could never live somewhere cold, the other softens their own love of crisp winters before they have even named it. The result is not two honest sets of preferences. It is one set of preferences and a series of small accommodations made by the person who happened to answer second, or speak less forcefully.
A fair decision needs two genuine inputs. The moment one person sees the other's answer, you no longer have two inputs. You have one input and an echo.
This is rarely deliberate. The accommodating partner is not being passive on purpose. They are doing what humans do around an anchor, which is to treat it as the centre of gravity and orbit it. The problem is that the move gets built on preferences that were quietly bent, and that bending tends to surface later as resentment in a place that was never really chosen by both people.
How the privacy model works
The fix is structural rather than a matter of willpower. We ask each person to answer all twelve factors alone, with no view of what the other has said, no running total, and no hint about which way their partner is leaning. There is nothing to anchor to, so each set of answers reflects what that person actually wants rather than a negotiated position formed on the spot.
A few things follow from this:
- Both of you answer the same questions cold, so neither set of preferences is contaminated by the other.
- Nothing is shared until both intakes are complete, which removes the incentive to peek and adjust.
- The merged shortlist is produced from two clean inputs, then the differences are shown to you both at once, on equal footing.
That last point matters. We do not hide your answers forever. We hide them only until the moment they can be revealed together, side by side, with neither person having had the chance to shape the other's. When the comparison finally appears, you are looking at two honest pictures, and the conversation that follows is about reconciling real differences rather than unwinding accommodations nobody admitted to making.
It is a small piece of friction, asking two people to fill in the same form separately. But it buys something that is very hard to recover once lost: the confidence, months later in a new city, that the choice was genuinely both of yours. That is worth a few minutes of answering in private.
