August 2019 - Changes to rules regarding republishing of sold listings

Published at 2019-08-22

Hemnet has made a change in the rules regarding republishing of listings and project units that have previously been marked as sold.

Previously it was unintentionally possible to do so, which left the listing in a state of being sold and being published as for sale at the same time, which could cause a lot of issues. But in order to plug this problem in a way that does not cause too many issues for our existing users, the rules have changed.

Old behavior

Previously, you were not allowed to delete a sale; a sale was final, and the only way to get it out (ignoring the bug), was to call Hemnet Support and explain your case.

Since the bug was uncaught for such a long time, a lot of systems didn't know of this limitation and was using this "feature" a lot. Changing it would be a breaking change.

New behavior

The new rule is that if you try to publish a sold listing or project unit, then the sale will be automatically deleted and the listing yet again published; but only if the sale report happened less than 6 months ago. If the sale was reported more than 6 months ago, then the publication will fail with an error message.

The exact time frame is still something that we are working on, and we reserve the right to shorten this grace period significantly later on without bumping the API version. If the publication fails, you will receive an error message indicating the reason which hopefully would make it possible to recover from the issue.

The error message has been added as an example in the API documentation to help you with this.