About TafutaKeja

Tafuta keja is “look for a house”, Swahili and Sheng together. It is what most people in Nairobi are actually doing when they open a property site: not browsing an investment portfolio, but trying to find somewhere to live by the end of the month.

What it does

TafutaKeja is a property marketplace covering the whole journey: searching by estate rather than by county, comparing rent against service charge and deposit, saving places to a shortlist with private notes, and messaging the agent in a thread that both sides can read afterwards.

Agents get a dashboard to draft, publish and manage listings, upload photographs and answer enquiries. Every listing passes through a moderation queue before it goes live, and editing a published listing sends it back for review, because an approval that only applies to the words that were there at the time is not much of an approval.

About the listings

There is no open feed of Kenyan property, so the properties here are composed rather than real. None of them is a place you could go and rent. What is real is the part that makes the product worth building:

• the neighbourhoods and their coordinates: Kilimani, Buruburu, Syokimau, Nyali, Elgon View and thirty-odd others
• the price bands each one actually trades in, so a bedsitter in Juja and a four-bedroom in Runda are priced the way the market prices them
• the photography, and the amenities Kenyan listings genuinely advertise: borehole water, a backup generator, a DSQ

How it is built

React and Vite on the front, Express and MongoDB behind it, with photographs resized into responsive WebP at three widths so a page of twelve properties costs a couple of hundred kilobytes rather than several megabytes. The public pages are prerendered to static HTML at build time, and each property page carries structured data, though a property that has been let or sold drops it and asks not to be indexed, because advertising something nobody can rent is worse than saying nothing.