Two facts carry most of what a flat in this city is worth, and one of them is routinely left out of the advert entirely.
Open any property listing here and you will see the size, the bedrooms and the price. You will often not see the floor, and you will sometimes not see the ward. Both of those are worth more than the size.
Take the floor first, because it is the one that gets hidden. In a building with a lift the floor changes the rent a little: higher is hotter and quieter, and the top floor takes the sun on the roof. In a building without a lift the floor changes the rent a great deal, and it should. Sixty eight stairs is a real fact about a home. It decides how you buy rice, whether you order a gas bottle or carry one, what happens when a grandmother visits, and how you feel about going out again at nine in the evening. In the wards we work in, a fifth floor with no lift lets for somewhere around fifteen hundred rufiyaa a month less than the same flat on the second, and a landlord who refuses to accept that spends three months finding out.
So we put it in the first line: the floor, and whether there is a lift, and how many stairs. Landlords occasionally ask us to leave the stairs out. We do not, because a tenant who discovers the stairs at the viewing has been wasted an evening and will not come back to us, and one who discovers them after signing leaves in month four.
The ward is the second fact and it is a different kind of information. This is a small city and people who do not live here assume that means distance does not matter. It matters more, not less, because almost nobody drives. What a ward tells you is the walk: to the school you want, to a shop that sells vegetables in the evening, to the ferry terminal, to the health centre, to where you work. A twelve minute walk and a twenty five minute walk are genuinely different lives when both are done four times a day in this heat, and in the rain they are not comparable at all.
Wards also carry a character that has nothing to do with the map. Some are quieter at night. Some have a particular problem with parking a motorcycle. Some have three schools inside four hundred metres, which is wonderful if you have children and means a great deal of traffic at seven in the morning if you do not.
Put those two facts together and you have most of what a tenant is actually choosing between. Everything else on a listing is either obvious from the photographs or negotiable.
Which is why our enquiry form asks for the ward and the bedrooms and the month, and not much else. Give us those and we can tell you within an hour whether what you want exists at your budget. If it does not, we will say so, and suggest the two things people usually trade: a floor higher, or a ward further out. Almost everybody trades one of them in the end, and it is better to choose which rather than to spend six weeks discovering it.
