Why our New Zealand address data is streets ahead!

Picture New Zealand. Picture stunning, varied, epic landscapes., If you don’t have another mental image ready to hand, picture Lord of the Rings. Now picture being the organization responsible for delivering mail to, and logging the address information of, everyone in that country, in every valley, up every mountain, along every river. Feel like you need a lie down yet? 

So, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the address data in a country like that is… complex. Addresses aren’t just needed for delivery of post and ecommerce goods; they are also needed for a wide variety of purposes that have nothing to do with physical delivery. You might own a remote lodge for hikers and get your post from a PO box in the nearest town. Just because the postie doesn’t want to trek up to you every day, doesn’t mean you don’t still need your visitors to be able to find you. People also need home addresses to open a bank account or to register to vote, and a variety of other services and utilities. There are also places such as industrial estates which are covered by a single postbag or office for their post but require individual addresses for each warehouse and entrance. 

So basically, you have two “sets” of addresses – every point to which the New Zealand Post and assorted couriers will deliver, and every point on the map which has an allocated address regardless of delivery capability. 

So, with that being the case, how do we make sure we have ALL of the addresses searchable in one place for our clients using our global Address Auto-Complete tool? In New Zealand, as with many countries, there is more than one available address database available. The most commonly used is New Zealand Post’s Postal Address File or PAF (not to be confused with the UK Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File PAF which we also use of course!) a comprehensive and regularly updated list of all, approximately 2.1million, delivery points in the country. However, as we have established, a list of every deliverable point in a country is not necessarily a comprehensive list of all the addresses in that country. 

This is where HERE comes in. HERE is the world’s leading location data and technology company, with over 35 years of specialized map-making expertise. With their primary focus on mapping, they are less interested in whether a point is deliverable and more interested in the fact that it exists, and its exact placement. Therefore, they can sometime miss out on certain delivery points such as PO boxes, community mailboxes, private bags and counter delivery addresses. 

There are also other datasets we could use, each with their own strengths and short comings. Our expert data team, as they do with all our datasets, analysed all the options, compared the data in minute detail and came up with the best solution. Our New Zealand data combines the comprehensive mapping data of HERE and the complete list of deliverable addresses from PAF. Through a process of careful comparison and removal of duplicate addresses, our team has created the ultimate New Zealand address database for our clients containing over 2.8million addresses.  So that, no matter what your business requirement for address search might be, we have you covered.

In case you were wondering about which other data validation tools can be used for customer data capture in New Zealand, our best-in-class Phone Validation and Email Validation tool are also international, enabling our clients to collect a complete set of accurate customer data every time. 

For more information about our data in different countries, get in touch at support@fetchify.com, our team are always happy to help.