SpaceYako

House hunting in Nairobi runs on a specific kind of dread. You send a deposit for a viewing to somebody who sounds legitimate, and either the flat exists or it does not. Enough people have lost money that way that every new platform starts under suspicion, and no amount of reassuring copy fixes it, because the platform that took the last deposit had reassuring copy too.

So the model removes the mechanisms the scams depend on. Agents pay to list. Seekers never pay for anything. No money moves between users at any point, which means there is no deposit for the platform to be blamed for and no escrow claim we would have to make.

What is left is the harder problem: telling a stranger which agent can be believed. Verification appears against an agent only where we can currently substantiate it, and it disappears the moment we cannot. A badge that cannot be withdrawn is not a verification, it is a decoration. The interesting engineering is entirely in the part that removes it.

It is early, and we run it ourselves. The support inbox is ours, the takedowns are ours, and the decisions about what a badge is allowed to imply get made by the people who will answer for them.