How Listings Are Ranked

This page explains how Homjo orders what you see — the "main parameters" disclosure required by the EU Platform-to-Business Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, Article 5. It is written to match what the software actually does, not what a marketing page might wish it did.

Search and browse results

When you browse or search a pillar (Stay, Market, Services, Transport, Community, Launchpad), results are ordered by exactly one of the following:

Newest first — ordered by the date a listing was posted, most recent first.
Price: low to high or price: high to low — ordered by the listing's asking price. (The price shown is set by the lister; for Services requests, budgets are indicative only.) Listings with no price are placed last, whichever direction you pick.
Distance — ordered by straight-line distance from a location you pick, nearest first. Offered only once you have picked one.
Event date — soonest event first. Community only.
Departure time — soonest departure first. Carpool rides only, and this one is not your choice: see below.

That is the complete list for pillar browse and search. Within them there is no relevance score, no engagement or popularity weighting, no account-history personalisation, and no quality score: your clicks, views and saved listings do not change the order anyone sees, and the view or enquiry counts shown on a listing do not affect its position. One surface does use a quality figure — the Setup Kit comparison tool — and it has its own section below.

Which one you get by default. Newest first, on every pillar — except that two of them move off it without being asked. You can always set the sort back:

On Community, you get Event date instead, from the moment the page loads.
On Stay, picking a location switches you to Distance; clearing it switches you back.

Where the sort is not yours to choose. When you use the carpool ride finder on Transport, results come back by Departure time regardless of which sort you selected — unless you selected a price sort, which is kept. Nothing else overrides your choice.

Ties. Whenever two listings tie, or a sort value is missing, the newest listing comes first. Event date has one extra step before that: among events on the same date, the nearer event comes first, measured from the location you picked or, if you have not picked one but have asked to see only what is near you, from the centre of your city.

Paid placement

Listers can pay to Boost a listing. A Boost can also be given free, as promotional credit; where it is, it behaves exactly like a paid one and is labelled the same way.

A Boost never changes search or browse order. The orderings described above contain no Boost term of any kind. Payment cannot buy position in them.

The Sponsored strip above Browse results. The browse page carries a separately-headed section, labelled Sponsored, above the result list. It shows up to 3 boosted listings, scoped to the city you are browsing and — when you are on a pillar — to that pillar; on the all-pillars browse page it shows Boosts from any pillar except Community, which is never a paid surface. Within the strip, listings are ordered by Boost tier — Top, then Premium, then Featured — and ties within a tier go to the Boost with the most time remaining, then to the most recently posted listing. The strip has its own heading, its own explanation, and a Sponsored label on every card. The result list beneath it is unchanged: it is produced by exactly the orderings described above, with no Boost term, and a listing in the strip holds whatever position in that list it would have held without the Boost. With no Boosts running for that city and pillar, the strip does not appear at all.

What else a Boost changes is placement in the discovery sections that sit outside search — the Boosted ribbon, the "Recent listings" grid on each pillar's landing page, and the listing grids on the home page. In all of them boosted listings come first, ordered by Boost tier — Top, then Premium, then Featured. What breaks a tie within a tier differs by section: the ribbon puts the Boost with the most time remaining first, and the grids put the most recently posted listing first. Every card in every one of them carries a Sponsored label, so you can always tell.

How the tiers look. The label is the same for every tier. Beyond it, a Premium listing's card carries a coloured ring, and a Top listing's card carries a coloured ring and a small "Pinned" chip beside the Sponsored label. That is the whole visual difference between tiers; none of it moves a listing within any ordering described on this page.

With no Boosts running, none of this applies: the Boosted ribbon and the Sponsored strip do not appear at all, and the grids are simply the most recently posted listings, which is what the Boost term orders them ahead of. From the first live Boost onwards the ribbon appears — a single Boost is enough, because what you buy cannot depend on whether anyone else has bought it.

Two details about the ribbon that are easy to assume wrongly. It is scoped to the city you are browsing, not the pillar — a boosted Stay listing appears in the ribbon on every pillar's page for that city. And a lister sees their own Boost in the Boosted ribbon, so they can check what they paid for; their own listings are still hidden from the organic "Latest in" row, which is there to show them what everyone else has posted.

"Latest in" includes boosted listings. The organic "Latest in" row is ordered by posting date only and does not exclude a listing because it is boosted. (It used to: buying a Boost removed a listing from that row. It no longer does — paying never costs a listing organic reach.) A boosted listing that is also among the newest therefore appears in both rows, labelled Sponsored in each.

The maps are not a paid surface. The Stay maps on the home and landing pages plot a limited number of pins, so anything that ordered them by Boost would decide which listings appear at all — and a pin has no room for a label. They are ordered by recency only, and a Boost buys nothing on them.

Services requests (fan-out)

When a seeker posts a Services request, a provider is notified when all of the following are true. This is the whole test — there is nothing else in it:

their listing is on Services, live, and in the request's category;
their listing is in the request's city;
the listing is within 25 km of the job, when both the listing and the request carry an exact address. If either side does not, distance is not applied and the provider is still notified;
neither party has blocked the other.

There is no ranking, scoring or ordering of providers, and no payment or subscription tier changes who is matched. Distance is used only to decide whether a provider is notified at all — never to order them, and never to decide who hears first.

What a paid tier changes is speed: providers on a paid plan are notified immediately, while providers on the free plan receive a once-daily digest. The audience is the same test either way, and neither lane ranks it.

Two limits on the digest, stated plainly because they are real. A digest is built from at most 20 matched requests, newest first, of which the newest 8 are listed in full — title, category and city — and the remainder appear only as a count. And a request only reaches the instant lane once it has a location on file. So a free-plan provider matching more than 8 open requests at once sees 8 of them named that day; the rest are not marked as sent, and surface in a later digest.

Making offers is subject to a per-plan monthly allowance — currently 5 offers per month on the free plan, 10 on Homjo Plus, and unlimited on Business (see the pricing page). Separately, and identically for every plan including Business, offers are rate-limited to 3 per hour and 10 per day; that is an anti-spam limit, not a paid feature. The allowance is fixed in advance, applies equally to everyone on a plan, and never depends on which requests a provider accepts, declines or cancels. The seeker alone chooses which offer to accept.

Listings Homjo posts itself

Homjo does not sell anything and owns no inventory. Everything on Homjo is offered by the people and businesses using it.

There is one exception, and it is labelled wherever it appears. Some good local providers are not set up on Homjo yet. Where a provider is happy for us to, we put their listing up for them and hold it on their behalf until they take it over. Those listings carry a "[provider] — listed by Homjo with their permission" label and a short explanation you can open from the label. The provider named on the listing is who you are dealing with — not Homjo.

Because Homjo operates the platform and also holds those listings, we are required to tell you plainly where that account is treated differently from any other business user, in either direction.

Where the Homjo account can do more:

It can post a listing on behalf of someone else and record that provider's name on it. No other account can do this — a listing you post is always your own.
Because Homjo operates the platform, the people who run it can see the operational data any site operator can see, including data about listings and requests. This is not a commercial advantage given to a seller; it is the ordinary consequence of running the service, and it is described in the Privacy Policy.

Where the Homjo account can do less — deliberately:

These listings can never be promoted. Homjo-held listings are refused paid placement outright, including free promotional credits. This is enforced in the software, not by policy.
They are ranked exactly like everyone else's. Ordering never considers who holds a listing or how it got here. There is no boost, no pinning, and no separate pool.
The account receives no Services request notifications. It is excluded from the fan-out described above, so it never competes for work.
They carry no reviews or ratings until real customers leave them, and nobody at Homjo rates them.

Why any of this exists. Homjo is new, and a marketplace with nothing in it is no use to anyone. Rather than invent listings, we help real providers get theirs up — and where that means holding one for a while, we say so on the listing and give that listing no advantage of any kind. The aim is for the provider to take it over; the label goes away when they do.

Money. Homjo pays itself nothing and charges itself nothing. Holding a listing for a provider costs them nothing, and no fee, plan or allowance depends on whether Homjo posted a listing or the provider did.

The Setup Kit, which compares providers

The Setup Kit (/setup-kit) compares utility and service providers — broadband, mobile plans and the like — that Homjo adds to the comparison itself. It is a separate surface from pillar browse, and it is ordered differently, so it is set out here rather than left to the sentence above.

The default order is quality-first. With no sort chosen ("Recommended"), providers are ordered by rating, highest first, then by review count, then alphabetically. The rating is a figure recorded on the provider's entry when Homjo assembles the comparison — it is not calculated from activity on Homjo, and Homjo users do not move it by clicking or enquiring.

The sorts you can choose. Depending on the category, you can re-order by:

Price: low to high — by the provider's lowest listed price.
Rating — highest first, the same figure the default uses.
Fastest install — by the provider's stated maximum installation time.
Shortest contract — by the provider's stated contract length.

Whichever you pick, ties fall back the same way: rating, then review count, then name. Providers missing a value for the sort you chose are placed last.

No payment moves any of it. No provider pays for position in the Setup Kit, there is no Boost term in it, and no plan or subscription — theirs or yours — changes the order.

The events feed, which is not a listings feed

The Community events page (/community/events) is not covered by the section above, and it is ordered differently, so it is set out here rather than left to be assumed.

Those events are gathered from public sources — Dublin City Council and Visit Dublin — rather than posted by people using Homjo. They are ordered by curator's pick first, then soonest. A curator's pick is an editorial choice made by a person at Homjo.

Where those picks are labelled depends on what you are looking at. With no filters applied, up to three of them appear in a separate section headed "Curator's picks". Once you apply a filter that section is not shown, and the picks — all of them, not three — simply come first in the list, with nothing marking them as picks. Nothing about that ordering is for sale, and nothing in it depends on engagement, popularity or who is viewing.

An event's own page also shows up to three Stay listings within 2 km of the venue, ordered by distance to it, nearest first. That ordering is fixed — it is not yours to change, and nothing else is in it.

Connect (match mode)

Connect shows you one profile at a time, so the order is the product. Since 7 September 2026 every active profile in your category and city is a candidate — where someone lives narrows nothing on its own. Profiles are ordered by a score made of, in descending weight: being on the same side of the city (Dublin's city centre, northside, southside or west, derived from the area each person picked); the same area or an area on your "also happy with" list; for flatmates, budgets within 20% of each other and move-in dates within 30 days; and interests you both listed. Each card shows the reasons that applied to it. A "zone" filter you set yourself is the only thing that removes people from the deck, apart from profiles you already swiped, people you have blocked or who blocked you, and profiles older than 90 days. For carpooling the same idea applies with the trip's start as the main criterion: people whose trip starts on the same side of the city rank first, then the same or a nearby start area, then a matching destination, then a matching start point, then shared days and time. Someone who has already shown interest in you is shown before the rest and marked "Liked you" — that is the only signal that moves a card ahead of the score. Nothing paid changes this order, and nobody's card is placed higher because of a subscription.

What ranking never uses

Ordering and matching never use protected characteristics (such as nationality, gender, religion, disability, family status or sexual orientation), and never use the content of your messages.

Questions and complaints

If you are a business user and believe ranking on Homjo is not working as described here, contact legal@homjo.com. This page changes only via a published update, and the date below moves when it does.

Version 1.7 · Published 6 August 2026 · Updated 7 September 2026