Changes to Rural addresses - How does this affect you?

What is the current state?

Rural addresses in New Zealand currently come in two forms: 1. Postal format (eg, 4 Waitara Road, RD 42, Waitara 4382) 2. Physical format (eg, 4 Waitara Road, Brixton 4382)

The postal format is not changing so will be ignored for the remainder of this paper.

The physical format is currently made up of the following information: - Unit/level information (eg, Unit 6) - Street number and name (eg, 4 Waitara Road) - Locality - mandatory (eg, Brixton) - Postcode (eg, 4382)

What is changing?

The address will soon be supplemented by a ‘Major Name’. The “major names describe the wider area in which the (locality) boundary is located.” - LINZ.

The new format of rural addresses will be as follows: Unit/level information (eg, Unit 6) Street number and name (eg, 4 Waitara Road) Locality (eg, Brixton) Major name (eg, Waitara) Postcode (eg, 4382)

So for the 4 Waitara Road address example above, the new full physical address would be: 4 Waitara Road, Brixton, Waitara 4382.

Why are these changes being made?

“The main reason for adopting the major name was to remove duplication where the same address and suburb name exist in separate parts of the country.” Reference LINZ.

For websites and organisations using rural address checkers or verification tools, it will ultimately result in a higher level of customer data quality as it will reduce the likelihood of customers selecting addresses in an incorrect locality as a result of rural address duplication.

When will these changes be made?

The changes have already been made in the LINZ data but we are delaying rolling things out to our customers until we have provided sufficient warning of the change.

We are planning on releasing these changes in mid January 2024 (approximately two months from now).

We will continue to update our address data on a monthly basis but not including ‘major name’ in the data.

From mid-January, our rural address checker will include the ‘major name’ field in all results for rural addresses supplied by our address autocomplete tool.

Will all addresses now have a unique suburb and city?

No - a number of addresses will still have a suburb and city of the same name. Addresses like these often occur in towns (E.g. 74 Lemon Street, New Plymouth 4310) and these will also continue to occur in rural areas where the locality and major name match (E.g. 50 Morse Street, Wairau Valley 7271). In these circumstances, the suburb and city fields will return identical information.

Where will the Major name appear in the Addressfinder response?

In the full address (a), the Major name will appear between the locality and postcode. In the metadata response, the Major name will be returned in the city field. The locality, which is currently returned in both the suburb and city fields, will now appear only in the suburb field. Example of address data being returned from the Addressfinder APIs before and after the changes have been made: