Changelog
What shipped, and when. Every entry below went out to everyone, dated by the commit that made it. For the current picture rather than the running record, read what findproperly does.
Organisations
One library for the whole firm, so a report anyone pulls is a report everyone can read. Roles that separate who can spend from who can only look, and credits pooled across the office instead of stranded in one person's account. Still being built. It is not in the record below, because it has not shipped.
A public site
A public site now sits in front of the app, and this page is the running record of what changes in it. Every entry is drawn from the commit history, so nothing here is a plan or a promise.
Sign in and land on Search
Signing in used to put you on the assistant, which is not open yet. You now land on Search, the map with the address bar on it. Arriving at the sign-in page while already signed in ends up in the same place.
Owner ID numbers stay off the report
A South African ID number is thirteen digits carrying a date of birth, a gender and a citizenship status. Reports used to print one beside every natural person's name. They no longer do, in the page or in the data behind it, and the owner's name and document number already answer who owns what.
Satellite view, and a fuller report
The search map takes a Map/Satellite toggle. Reports grew a Building section out of data the registry was already sending: rooms, wall and roof type, garages, pool. Where the registry has never recorded an answer, the report says nothing rather than saying no.
A fresh coat
The interface moved onto one component base and took the palette that comes with it. Two primitive libraries had been doing the same job and both were shipping to your browser. One is gone.
Nearby sales, charted
Every report carries about fifteen registered sales around its subject, and they used to be a fifteen-row table. They are bars now, newest on top, with the date written on the bar and the price in a column beside it. The table still holds size, distance and the button that buys a comparable, folded away behind a trigger.
Reports you buy, and top-ups when you run out
The app could spend money at the deeds registry and never take any. There is a plan now that grants an allowance of reports each month, a gate that will not release one without a credit, and Paystack to collect. A search that finds nothing is free, and top-ups bought on the side outlive the month they were bought in.
estateindex is now findproperly
New name, and a map pin for a mark. The pin is drawn as a path rather than shipped as an image, so it stays sharp at favicon size, takes its colour from wherever it sits, and flips to near-white against dark browser chrome.
A report you own stops posing as a nearby sale
Buy a unit through the scheme form and the map kept drawing it as somebody else's grey sale tag, next to your own green pin. Identity now comes from the report itself, at the one point where the registry has actually said what the property is. Reports pulled before the change were backfilled by the same rule.
The complex you searched for is the one you get
Searching a complex by name could set you up to buy a report for the scheme next door. Google returns a complex as a name plus the street it fronts, the name was being dropped, and the registry answered about the street with a neighbour's units. The name is kept now, through to the unit form, which lets you type a scheme instead of picking from whatever the street search happened to return.
Failed lookups explain themselves
Naming a scheme and a unit the registry does not have used to end the search, throw away the candidates the street search had already found, and blame the street number. A miss now hands you back to the list with a note saying what was not found, so you can correct the number or pick a candidate. A broken fetch also looks broken: the row pulses in the list, and the pin turns red where it used to sit in the same green as a finished report.
Peek at a parcel
Clicking a parcel used to leave the map for the report page, which is a lot of clicking to find out what one property is. It opens a drawer over the map now, with the outline still visible behind it and the report one button away. The drawer lists the whole parcel in one place: units you hold a report for, and sale prices already sitting in reports you paid for, each row badged for which it is.
Schemes and suburbs come back to the address search
The address bar only offered street addresses, on the reasoning that a coffee shop has no title deed. That filter also swallowed the names people actually type in a deeds app: a complex or a suburb came back empty while Google knew both perfectly well. It is gone.
Map-first property search
Search on a map, drop the pin on an address, and buy the deeds report behind it: owner, transfers, bonds, endorsements. Everything you pull is kept and drawn back on the map, clustered until you zoom in, then outlined with its cadastral parcel and labelled with a value. Boundaries come from the Council for Geoscience cadastral layer, because the deeds registry ships no geometry at all.
Longer reads on the South African property market are on the findproperly blog.