From submission to public: how a listing gets published

The six states a listing can be in

A listing is always in exactly one of these. Only one of them is public.

• draft — being written, seen only by you
• pending_review — submitted, waiting for a Domicium officer
• active — approved, and the only state that can ever be public
• rejected — turned down at review
• paused — withdrawn from view by you, without deleting it
• archived — finished with

The review step

A new listing arrives as pending_review. A member of staff either approves it, which sets it to active and stamps the publication time, or rejects it. Both outcomes are written to the audit log with the officer's identity.

Row-level security restricts that status change to staff. A landlord session cannot set its own listing to active, whatever request it sends.

The second condition

Active is necessary and not sufficient. A listing is only shown to the public when the property also carries a verification tier of bronze or better.

This is the condition that used to be missing. The public path asked whether the listing status was active and nothing else, which is how an unverified property in Spintex stayed live in search while the pages around it said every landlord was checked.

Where the rule lives

In the database. property_is_public() requires an active listing joined to a property with a publishable tier, and the read policy on listings delegates to it. Search, the featured row, the sitemap, structured data and a direct lookup by URL slug all pass through the same function.

The application layer applies the same filter, and the two are asserted against each other by tests. But the boundary is in the database on purpose: a filter written in a query is only as good as the next person remembering to write it, and three separate public queries had already drifted apart.

If your listing is not appearing

Work through it in this order. In most cases it is the second condition rather than the first.

1. 1Check the listing status. If it is pending_review, it is waiting for a reviewer.
2. 2Check your verification tier. If the property is unverified, no amount of approval will make the listing public.
3. 3Request verification for the property or the account, whichever is missing.
4. 4If both are in order and it is still absent, raise a complaint against Domicium itself — that is a supported category.