Getting started
Motley turns the sprawl of NYC’s 262 neighborhoods (197 of them residential) and thousands of schools into clear answers for yourfamily. The more we know about who you are and what you’re weighing, the sharper those answers get. Here’s how to set up in a few minutes.
1. Create your account
Sign in with Google. That’s the only way in — there are no passwords to remember or reset. Signing in keeps your family profile, saved schools, and neighborhood research in sync across every device you use. You can browse most of Motley without an account, but signing in is what lets us personalize and save your work.
2. Tell us about your family
The easiest way is to just talk it through: open Motley Intelligence(it’s the first screen when you sign in) and say “help me set up our family profile.” It asks a question or two at a time, rounds out the optional details, and then proposes the whole profile in one go — you review it and confirm. Same result as the form, fewer forms. See Motley Intelligence.
Prefer a form? The onboarding wizard covers the same ground in eight short steps: about you, your situation, your partner, your children and their grades, housing and budget, your neighborhood priorities, your school priorities, and a wrap-up. Each step saves as you go, so you can stop and pick it back up later.
One step isn’t skippable: your home address, on the Housing & Budget step. It anchors everything we calculate for you — your district, your zoned school, and how far anything is from where you actually live. If you’re moving, use the address you’re starting from; you can change it any time.
3. Rank your priorities
This is the step that makes Motley yours. Instead of forcing you into a preset, we let you rank the things families weigh — academics, class size, diversity, programs, how close a school is, parent satisfaction, and special-education support — plus what matters in a neighborhood. Smart Match ranks schools against your order, and the Best fit sort on Neighborhoods starts from your profile, and you can reorder what matters right on the page.
4. Fine-tune it later
Everything is editable under Settings — add or edit children, update your home address, change your school preferences, adjust your priorities, or turn notifications on and off. See Family profiles & children for how children and saved profiles differ.
What to do next
- Rank neighborhoods by what matters to your family.
- Search schools and early education (3-K, Pre-K, NYCEEC).
- Read up on how NYC admissions works before the deadlines land.
- Get your bearings in your dashboard.