What we shipped in September

Most of September went on three unglamorous things: the map you search on, the photos you look at, and the small print on a listing. We also went back through our own pages and took out what we could not prove. Here is what changed for you.

If you are looking for a home

The map was rebuilt. Pins no longer jump when you hover over them. Clicking a pin opens the listing's card beside it, or as a sheet from the bottom of the screen on a phone, and clicking the card opens the listing. Results update as you move the map. If you turn that off, we remember, and a Search this area button appears once you have moved. On the explore map, after you have moved around an area twice, we offer to save that search and tell you when a new listing appears in it.

A darker map, and a cleaner satellite view. The dark map now matches the page it sits on, with roads drawn faintly instead of in colour. The satellite view no longer paints roads over the photograph, because the roads are already in it. Only place names sit on top.

Photos load again, and they are lighter. Around the start of September, listing photos stopped appearing on the buy, rent and explore pages. The cause was an image-resizing service we pay for: its allowance ran out and it began refusing requests. We now serve our photos straight from our own storage, which our upload process had already compressed. Listing cards load a copy made for a card, 960 pixels wide, instead of the full photograph, which is less data on a phone. Older photos were converted in the background.

The agency fee is on the listing. Agents could already enter an agency fee when they listed a property, and we saved it, but the listing page never showed it. That is the worst way for a cost to go missing, because the agent believes it has been disclosed and the first you hear of it is at signing. It now sits with the deposit and service charge in the listing's details. If the fee is a percentage, we show the percentage. We do not turn it into a shilling figure, because we do not record whether it applies to one month's rent, the annual rent or the sale price, and a number we guessed would look like a fact.

No more mortgage estimates on rentals. That one was our mistake. The monthly cost estimate on a listing page was appearing on rentals, where it treated a month's rent as a purchase price. A flat renting for KES 90,000 a month showed a repayment of about KES 1,000. The estimate now appears only on homes for sale. It no longer appears on auctions either, where the price is a reserve or a guide rather than an agreed price.

The mortgage calculator agrees with itself. When you open the mortgage calculator from a listing, it fills in that listing's price. A price outside the calculator's range used to show one figure while the slider showed another. The calculator covers KES 500,000 to KES 100,000,000, and a price outside that range now starts at the nearest end, so the figure and the slider always match.

Listing titles describe the right property. A plot described as ideal for apartments could appear in search results and link previews as a four-bedroom apartment for sale. Titles now read the property type correctly, and land listings no longer pick up a stray bedroom count.

Listing and agent pages open faster. These pages used to be built from scratch on every visit. Before the change, a listing page took more than two seconds to start loading. They are now prepared in advance and refreshed every hour, the same way our fastest pages already were, which start in about half a second. A listing published in between still opens on its first visit.

Expired listings stay expired. A listing comes down after sixty days unless the agent renews it. Two places had missed that rule: you could still request a viewing on an expired listing, and a price-drop alert could send you a link to one. Both now check that the listing is live.

Easier with a keyboard, a screen reader or a thumb. The agent offer strip at the top of public pages no longer pushes the page down after it loads. Once you dismiss it, its buttons can no longer be reached with the Tab key, and on a phone they are now large enough that a mistap does not send you somewhere you did not mean to go. On the fraud report form, the list of reasons now behaves as a single choice and a screen reader announces it that way. The hint text inside the viewing booking form and the fraud report form was too faint to read against our dark background. It is now readable.

The homepage. The homepage now shows a satellite photograph of Nairobi with live listings pinned on it, and each pin opens its listing. If you are signed in and open SpaceYako fresh, you go straight to the map.

If you are an agent

The agency fee you enter is now shown. Before September it was saved with your listing but never displayed. Buyers and tenants now see it next to the deposit and service charge, which is where they look for it.

The pricing page only promises what we deliver. We removed Professional photo support and Priority customer support from every plan, because nothing in SpaceYako provides either. The Unlimited plan's feature list said it came with 3 listing credits, which contradicted its own name. It now says what it does: no listing limit while the plan is active. Priority search ranking stays, because featured listings really are served first in search results. Prices are written as KES throughout.

Your profile and the agents directory load faster. Both are now prepared in advance in the same way as listing pages.

What we took out

If you added SpaceYako to your phone's home screen, the install prompt said it offered verified properties, trusted agents and secure transactions. We check agents, not properties, and we cannot promise that a transaction between two people is secure. The prompt now says what we actually do: listings come down after sixty days unless the agent renews them, and agents carry an ID check you can see.

We also closed a few narrow security gaps found in our own review. The links that unsubscribe you from our emails are signed with a secret key, and if that key had ever been missing the old code would have signed them with an empty one. The key was set on our live site, but the code no longer depends on that: without a key it refuses the link. Checking a phone verification code now takes the same time whether a guess is close or not, so timing cannot reveal the answer. The newsletter sign-up has its own, stricter limit on how often it can be used.

The same rule as last month

In August we said a trust claim you never check is just a claim. September was mostly us applying that to ourselves: a fee that was collected and never shown, an estimate that was wrong on every rental, a promise on the pricing page with nothing behind it. Each was easy to miss from inside the code and plain to anyone reading the page.

More in October. If something on SpaceYako is not working the way you expect, tell us. That is how the next one of these gets written.