2026-09-13

• Fixed: "Parking available for a fee" was showing as Street Parking. The rule wanted the word garage, carport or assigned next to the fee before it would say Parking ($); a manager who writes "parking available for an additional fee" or "parking $75" is saying the same thing. About 280 listings move from Street Parking to Parking ($).
• The nightly refresh now wakes the computer to run (when it is asleep, plugged in), and a step that gets interrupted by the laptop sleeping is no longer counted as timed out.

2026-09-12

• The listings now load in pieces, one per area, instead of one 14 MB file. They download side by side, and an area whose listings did not change keeps its cached copy between days. Nothing looks different; it is groundwork for showing your own area first.
• Housing type has one "Unclear" instead of "Unclear" and "Never mentioned". Both meant we would not pick a type for you; one label is easier to read.
• The places box on each card now just says "Click to set your own!" until you set your places.
• About 110 more property managers and about 1,800 more listings in one evening (7,700 → 9,500 listings, 324 → 432 managers). The discovery step now reads five times more of the public web index than before and found 2,250 manager portals it had never checked; the ones whose listings sit in Southern California were added. Long Beach alone went from 566 to 626 listings.
• Two more kinds of manager website can now be read. Managers on Rentvine and on Rent Manager's own website product publish their vacancies on pages we had written off as login-only. They were not; the listings were one path over. Their units now flow in like everyone else's.
• Managers whose site is built by AppFolio itself were being missed. Those sites load the listings after the page opens and never print the portal's name, so the finder saw "a site with no listings". It now works out the portal and proves it by the map pins on it.
• Fixed: a company in Alberta or Indiana with the same name as a Southern California one could be counted as ours. A manager's website now has to show a Southern California address, ZIP or phone before it counts.
• Fixed: "Studio" under Housing Type found only 130 listings. Any unit with zero bedrooms is a studio, whatever the description forgot to say; the filter now finds all 1,500 of them.
• Fixed: one real listing was blocking the whole publish. A safety check that keeps a private address out of the build was refusing every building on the same street; it now refuses only that one address.
• The morning refresh now also re-reads the RentCafe, DoorLoop, Rentvine and Rent Manager sites. Until today it re-read only AppFolio, Buildium and ShowMojo, so the others stayed as they were on the day they were last run by hand.
• Parking and laundry now say one of three things each. Parking is Parking (it comes with the rent), Parking ($) (it exists, you pay extra), or Street Parking. Laundry is W/D in Unit, W/D in Unit (H/U) if it's hookups and you bring the machine, or W/D Shared for a laundry room or anything on site. Managers write these a dozen ways - "Assigned Parking", "Garage available for $100.00", "Community Washroom - Coin Operated" - and three spellings of one fact can't be compared at a glance. Their exact words are still there when you hover.
• A listing that never mentions parking now reads as Street Parking. A manager with off-street parking says so, because it's the thing they advertise, so silence in a Southern California rental means you're parking on the street. That moved 3,129 listings out of "not stated", which told you nothing, and into an answer. The tag is dashed and the hover says the manager never mentioned it, so you can always tell what was stated from what we read into it.
• Nothing is held back for having street parking any more. Listings whose only parking was the street used to be split into a separate "excluded" pile and marked in red, from back when this site was one person's own apartment hunt with a parking requirement. That was about 4% of listings, and under the new rule it would have been 47%. Street parking is one of the three normal options now.

2026-09-08

• Filters nobody else has, from our own record. "Price reduced": the rent is lower than in our daily roster from about a week ago, and the card says how much and since when. "Vouchers accepted": the manager's own stated answer to AppFolio's Section 8 question, shown as a card chip too. "Move-in special", "some utilities included" and "water and trash included" as one-click filters. Two accessibility must-haves, elevator and ground floor. And in Commute, "within N minutes of one of my places" by driving, transit or walking, using the same numbers the cards already show, kept in your browser and never in a shared link.
• 1.4 MB less on every visit. Two files were downloading in the background on every visit: the photo lists for every listing (1.0 MB) and the "what's close" table (0.4 MB), together heavier than the listing data itself. Now a listing's extra photos arrive only when you swipe or open it, in a few kilobytes, and the close-to table loads on the first popup. Someone who only browses the map downloads neither.
• Faster first load. The listing data file every visitor downloads is a fifth smaller (about 1.7 MB instead of 2.1 MB compressed): each listing was carrying a block of pre-computed distances the page never read, and a megabyte of basemap drawing data now loads only if the fallback map is ever needed. The download also starts the moment the page arrives instead of after the scripts have loaded.
• More filters, Zillow-style, without a bigger bar. Inside "More": pets (cats, small dogs, dogs of any size), minimum baths, move-in date (now, within 30 or 60 days), new this week, a largest-size cap, must-haves (A/C, dishwasher, pool, gym, yard, gated, furnished, EV/solar, renovated), application fee $50 or less, deposit no more than a month's rent, and an "I qualify" pair - your credit score and monthly income - that hides listings whose stated minimums you don't meet. Every one is honest about silence: a listing that doesn't state the thing is left out while that filter is on. They all read as words in the address bar, so a search can be shared. Your two "I qualify" numbers never go in the link and stay in your browser.
• Fixed: the More pill said "2 on" before you touched anything. Two settings that are on by default were being counted as filters. Clearing or resetting now goes back to the defaults instead of switching them off, which used to hide 343 listings.
• About 130 more property managers, about 2,400 more listings. A new discovery step finds every AppFolio portal on the public web and keeps the ones whose own map pins land in Southern California. The site went from 158 managers and 4,766 listings in the morning to 289 managers and 7,213 listings by the afternoon, and the step now runs before every refresh, so a new manager's portal shows up the day after it goes online. Honest footnotes: two of the portals it admitted were AppFolio demo accounts with invented listings ("123 State Street"); they were on the site for a few hours before we caught it, they're gone, and demo portals are refused outright now. And the new managers' names are derived from their web addresses until we confirm them, so a card may say "Northoak Prop" for a while. Where a manager prints a California DRE licence number, we now take the legal company name and business address from the state's public licence record instead.
• The Property Managers page now lists every manager whose listings are on the site, including the newly discovered ones, each marked as found automatically with its name unconfirmed. Before today it listed only the hand-checked ones, which undercounted by more than a hundred.
• Fixed: a morning refresh after an afternoon one found nothing new. Portal index pages were being reused for a full day, so listings posted overnight didn't show until the next day. They're re-read every run now.
• Refreshes are several times faster, so the day's listings land earlier. Nothing changes in what you see, only when.

2026-09-03

• Fixed: the Draw button was hiding under the map's zoom control. Zoom, Fit and Draw are one column now, bottom-right, and the map credit moved to the bottom-left so nothing sits on top of them.
• Fixed: the homepage was hidden behind "Loading listings" on slow connections. The loading screen now only covers the map and list, which are the parts that actually need the data.
• The places on your cards are samples until you change them. New visitors see drive/transit/walk times to five sample landmarks (Downtown LA, LAX, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Downtown San Diego). The table now says so and is one click from setting your own work, school or gym — and if you ever clear the list, the box stays and asks you to fill it.
• An "updates" page. This one. Linked in the footer as "what's changed".
• Support link. There's a small "Support this site" link in the footer now. Entirely optional, and it changes nothing about what you see — the site stays free for renters and nobody can pay to be listed higher.

2026-09-02

• Pet policies on nearly every listing. Pets went from almost never shown to 83% of listings. Cards say Pets OK, Pets, with limits, or No pets — hover for the manager's exact words, including whether it's cats-only or small-dogs-only, since 1,182 listings say "small dogs" and we weren't going to flatten that into a plain yes.
• New listings marked on the map. Anything first seen in the last 7 days now wears a gold ring on the map, the same gold as the "New" badge on its card.
• One colour for every dot. The map used to tint dots by housing type — five colours competing with the things that actually mean something (the new ring, the selection ring, transit lines). Housing type is a chip on the card and a filter in the bar; it doesn't need to be the dot's colour too.
• Credit score and income requirements on the card. Where a manager states them, "670+ credit" and "2.5× income" now show as chips — the two facts that decide whether applying is worth the fee. Previously buried inside the listing detail.
• Fixed: laundry mislabelled. Listings whose manager wrote "Washer/Dryer: Not in unit, laundry on site" were being tagged in-unit. That's the opposite of what they said. Corrected — it now reads as shared laundry.
• Fixed: "Ask the agent" was counted as an answer. The most common parking value managers type is literally "Ask the agent." It was being shown as if the manager had stated something. It's now treated as the non-answer it is.
• Laundry now read from the manager's own field. Most portals label it "Washer/Dryer:", which we weren't reading. Laundry stated directly by the manager went from 1.4% to 17% of listings.
• Fixed: the sources page misnamed a company (NeighborhoodScout) and left San Diego PD off the list of safety feeds. Both corrected.

2026-09-01

• Readable web addresses. Filters are words in the URL now: /map/utilities-paid, /map/2-bedrooms/under-2400, /rentals/long-beach/houses. Share one and the person gets exactly your search.
• Faster repeat visits. The listing data used to ride inside the page (~9 MB, re-downloaded every visit). It's a separate file now that your browser keeps, so coming back costs about 200 KB.
• Mobile pass. Nav collapsed from three rows to one, the filter row swipes sideways, Map/List is a floating toggle where your thumb already is, and controls are thumb-sized. The map also rendered 0px tall on phones — fixed.
• Fixed: photos beyond the first one weren't loading on 92% of listings. They are now.
• Fixed: clicking a listing sometimes highlighted the wrong one in the list beside the map. Twice. Both causes found and closed for good — selection is keyed on the listing itself now, not its position in a list that reorders.
• Fixed: the "monthly cost" table implied landlord-paid utilities were being added up. They now read "Handled by PM" with no dollar figure.
• Fixed: "$0" showing where a manager published no rent. It now shows a dash. Blank means blank.
• Removed the separate listing pages. Clicking a photo or address opens the popup right here instead of a second page.
• The homepage is white now.
• Dead links say so. A listing that's gone shows a real "no longer available" page with a search pre-filled for that street, instead of quietly showing the homepage.
• Every page has the same top bar. Clicking Safety or Market Data no longer feels like leaving the site.
• Fixed: three forms were silently discarding what you typed and saying thank you. They now compose an email you send yourself, so you can see it leave.
• Fixed: the site was telling Google its real address was a different domain. Corrected to sawthesign.com.

2026-08-31

• Safety page. The whole method, every feed, the full citywide table, and an honest list of what isn't covered. Never ranks cities, never says "safest."
• Utilities: who pays. Cards show which utilities the manager covers, quoted from their own text. Fixed a bug where "tenant pays" was being read as "owner pays" — and then fixed its mirror image, where "residents pay" wasn't being recognised at all.
• Realistic map. Street-level cartography with transit lines in their official colours, replacing the hand-drawn one.
• New yard-sign logo, on the site and as the browser icon.