Publishing a listing

A listing on Skautik is a record before it is an advertisement. It is filtered, compared against its market, and read next to others in the same street, so the fields that look administrative are the ones that decide whether anybody sees it.

The fields that decide whether you are found

Someone searching sets a place, a price and usually one more thing. Every filter they set removes not only the properties that do not match, but every property that left that field blank. A listing with no living area does not appear in a search with a minimum living area, however well it would have matched.

In rough order of how often they are filtered on:

Everything else improves the listing once somebody is reading it. These decide whether they ever do.

Address and precision

Give the real address where you can. Skautik geocodes it and records how exact the result is.

If a seller does not want the exact address public, that is supported: the coordinates become the centre of an area rather than the building, and the listing says so. A buyer plotting listings on a map can then tell the difference between "this building" and "somewhere around here", which is the difference between a wasted journey and a viewing.

What does not work is a deliberately wrong address. It geocodes confidently to the wrong place, and nothing marks it as approximate.

Photographs

Order matters: the first image is the one shown everywhere. Make it the room that sells the property, not the one nearest the front door.

Tag each image with what it shows. It groups the gallery sensibly and is what lets staging pick a sensible source image.

Photograph what exists. An empty room photographs badly and is still more useful than a photograph of a different flat.

Description

Write for somebody who has already read the numbers. They know the price, the area and the room count from the fields; the description is for what the fields cannot hold: which way the balcony faces, how the light moves through it, what the street is like on a weekday morning.

Do not repeat the specification in prose. Do not write in capitals. Do not put a phone number in the description; the enquiry form is what routes a buyer to you and what records that they consented to be contacted.

Price changes

Change the price on the record rather than withdrawing and re-publishing.

Skautik keeps a price history, which buyers can see. This is deliberate, and worth understanding rather than working around: a listing that has been reduced twice tells a buyer something real, and a re-published listing that pretends to be new is recognisable anyway, because the record is the same one.

A property re-published to hide a reduction usually gets less attention than one that reduced openly.

Withdrawing

Withdraw when it is sold, let, or off the market.

Withdrawal is not deletion. The record keeps its identifier and stays readable: its status changes and it leaves the default search. That matters for the market statistics, which need to know what sold and at what price, and it means a re-listing later is the same property rather than a new one.

Anything published through an import is owned by that import, and is withdrawn by removing it from the feed rather than here. Changing it in Skautik would be undone by the next run, so the API refuses rather than letting you make a change that will not last.

Publishing in bulk

More than a handful, or refreshed regularly, is a job for bulk import. In most cases the file you already send to a listing portal is one Skautik reads unchanged.