# Keaze platform guide
# Overview
Keaze is the leading platform for affordable homes in England, mainly focused on first time buyers.
Housing providers use the back-end app to load their inventory, create listings to advertise their properties and manage the sale process. Listings are published on different portals, some of them powered by Keaze, which will use the Keaze API for portals to search and display listings, register and manage customer applications and request web content to display.
# Properties and Listings
Properties are loaded in the back-end App for housing providers, as independent properties or as part of a development. To advertise those properties, users create listings, but unlike other platforms, in Keaze a listing can advertise a single property or a group of properties from the same development.
When a single listing advertises multiple properties, those properties could contain different amount of bedrooms, in which case, the minimum price per each total of bedrooms is computed, in order we could display the right price according to the home seeker preferences. That's why the price displayed for a listing could changed depending on the parameters and filters.
# Tenure
Tenure is the condition on which a property is held: freehold or leasehold.
# Schemes
As Keaze is focused on affordable homes, scheme is an important concept for the platform. Many housing providers offer their properties under government-backed schemes, aimed to help first time buyers onto the property market.
The most common schemes are:
- Shared Ownership: Scheme that allows buyers to own a share and then rent the part they don't own at a reduced rate.
- Help to Buy - Equity Loan: Scheme that offers an equity loan where the government lends money to buy a newly-built home
- Discount Market Sale: Low-cost home ownership product where a housing provider offers a discount on the purchase of a new build property.
- First Dibs: Scheme to ensure that new, lower-cost homes in the capital are marketed and sold exclusively to Londoners and UK-based buyers first.
- Rent to Buy: Scheme that allows you to rent a property for less than the market price for a set amount of time, in which you are expected to use the money saved from the lower rent for a deposit to buy the property after the tenancy ends.
Properties usually are related to a single scheme, but sometimes they can be sold under more than one scheme, like the case of Help to Buy and First Dibs.
When a listing is related to multiple properties, all these properties share the same scheme.
In some cases a scheme adds new information that need to be displayed to home seekers, like the case of Shared Ownership or Help to Buy. In those cases, there are some flags and attributes that provide extra information about what they offer and which fields are relevant to each one in listings and properties.
When returning listing or property details, the list of schemes will be always returned, as a collection of objects containing a text and a color. It's advisable to display the scheme as a tag using the field text as the label, and the field color for the background color. Notice that color is returned as a hexadecimal value, starting with the character #.
# Eligibility
In most cases, potential buyers need to be eligible to buy properties offered under some schemes. That's why some eligibility rules are attached to properties.
Rules are internally expressed in different ways, and to be checked, the following details from the customer are needed:
- Annual household income
- Deposit or savings
- Home local authority
- Work Local authority
- Age
- If he/she is a British, EU/EEA citizen or have Indefinite leave to remain
- If he/she is a First time buyer
When searching listings, it can be requested to return only results the home seeker is eligible for, but as the search only uses a subset of the possible attributes (only the first 4); it could happen that some listings could be returned when the home seeker is not really eligible for. When register interest, all details needed to check the eligibility are required, and at that moment the eligibility will be check to determine whether the home seeker is really eligible or not.
# Images
There are basically two different kind of images manage by Keaze, the ones that produce responsive versions, and the ones that not.
In the first case, usually gallery photos, the images are previously cropped to match the aspect ratio 16:9, and then, three different versions are generated:
- Thumbnail: maximum width is 360px
- Medium size: maximum width is 720px
- Large size: maximum width is 1080px
In the second case (floorplans and site plans), images are presented in their original sizes, but a thumbnail with a maximum width of 360px is also produced and returned.