List Your Property on Mercala: A Walk Through the Form

Why this form is longer than you expect

Most property portals ask for a price, a few photos and a paragraph of description. Mercala asks for more, and it is worth knowing why before you start: the extra fields are the ones that let a listing be verified rather than merely claimed.

Anyone can type a number into a box. A land registry extract or a building uittreksel is a different kind of statement — it can be checked. Fields backed by a document carry weight across Mercala; fields you simply declare are used to help buyers find your property, and nothing more. You do not have to supply every document, and the form will not force you to. But the ones you do supply are what separate your listing from the rest of the market.

The form has six steps, and you can move between them freely using the list on the left — it is not a one-way wizard. Nothing is submitted until you press Submit Listing on the last step.

A shortcut worth taking first

At the very top of Step 1 there is a field called Existing Listing URL. If your property is already advertised somewhere else — a broker site, another portal — paste that address in.

Mercala will read the page and fill in what it can find: the price, the size, the type of property, sometimes the coordinates. You then correct anything it got wrong. It is considerably faster than starting from an empty form, and it costs nothing to try: everything it fills in remains editable.

Step 1 — About the listing

This step establishes who you are in relation to the property, and it shapes the rest of the form. Six questions, all quick:

Are you the owner of this property? — owners and agents are both welcome; the answer is shown on the listing so buyers know who they are dealing with.

Is this an exclusive listing? — whether you hold the sole mandate to sell it.

Is there a building on this lot? — the single most consequential answer on the page. See below.

Is this property along a main road? — it affects value, in both directions, depending on what the property is for.

Do you have a professional appraisal (taxatierapport)? — if yes, Step 5 becomes relevant to you.

Is this a silent listing? — answer yes and the property is not shown publicly. Use this when an owner wants to test the market discreetly.

Is there a building on this lot? decides how the form treats your property from here on. Answer yes and Mercala asks for a street address and opens the whole Building & Physical step. Answer no and it asks for a cadastral ID instead — bare land often has no street number, and demanding one would mean inventing it.

Two uploads sit at the bottom of this step: Owner Identification Document and Mandate Contract. The mandate contract is the one that substantiates an exclusive listing — if you claimed exclusivity above, this is the document that backs the claim.

Step 2 — Location & Legal Identity

This is where the property stops being a description and becomes a specific place on Aruba.

Coordinates is a map: drop the pin on the property. Take a moment over it. The pin decides which district your property is counted in, which neighbourhood searches it appears in, and where it sits on the map for every buyer browsing the island. A pin left at a default location is one of the most common ways a genuine listing becomes invisible — Mercala rejects the well-known default map positions outright rather than publishing a property in the wrong country, so a careless pin means no pin at all.

Then the land itself: Island, Lot Size, and whether the lot is leasehold. If it is, three more fields appear — Annual Canon, Lease Expiry and the ground-lease grantor. Fill them in properly. On Aruba a long-lease canon and its remaining term move the value of a property substantially, and a buyer who has to ask for these details is a buyer already wondering what else is missing.

The address section — Street, Number, Suffix, Unit — appears when there is a building. Cadastral ID and Title Holder identify the parcel in the land registry.

Two documents belong to this step: the Land Registry Extract and the Title Deed. Together they are what allow the legal identity of the property to be verified rather than taken on trust. If you attach nothing else in the whole form, attach these.

Step 3 — Building & Physical

Skipped entirely for bare land. For everything else, this is the part buyers actually search on: Building Type, Year built, Living Area, Storeys, Bedrooms, Bathrooms.

For an apartment, Floor Number and Total Floors are worth completing — "third floor of four" tells a buyer something that "apartment" does not. If the property has a separate guest or rental unit, set Has ADU and say how many; it is a real value difference that a photo alone will not communicate.

The finish fields — Structure Type, Roof Type, Exterior Finish, Roof Material — are optional and safe to leave blank if you are unsure. A wrong answer is worse than a missing one.

The document here is the Building extract (uittreksel). It is what turns a stated living area into a verified one — and living area is the number buyers filter on hardest.

Step 4 — Contract & Terms

First, Contract Type: is this a sale or a rental? That choice changes the rest of the step.

For a sale, you need an Asking Price and a Listing status — Active, Pending or Closed. Leave it Active; the closing fields below it are for recording a sale that has already happened, and are better handled later from your listings page (see the last section).

For a rental, a different set opens: Available From, Minimum Lease, Utilities Included, Furnished, Pets and Smoking. These are the questions every prospective tenant sends as their first message. Answering them here saves you answering them twenty times by email.

Step 5 — Appraisal

Optional, and only relevant if you had a professional appraisal done. If you did, this step captures Market Value, Execution Value, Rebuild Value, the Appraiser and the Appraisal Date, with the Appraisal Report attached.

It is worth completing if you have the report. An appraised value from a named appraiser is a far stronger signal than an asking price alone, particularly to a buyer arranging financing.

Step 6 — Review, highlights and photos

The last step shows you a preview of your listing exactly as it will appear on Mercala. Read it as a buyer would. Anything that looks wrong here is a field on an earlier step — click through in the list on the left and fix it.

Property highlights is a long list of features — ocean view, pool, walk-in closet, and a couple of hundred more. Tick what genuinely applies. Buyers filter on these, so an accurate handful is worth more than an optimistic pile.

Photos are required. This is the only place in the form where quality of input maps almost directly onto results: photos are the first and often the only thing a buyer scrolling a list of properties actually looks at. Take them in daylight. Include the outside, the kitchen, the main living space and the land. A listing with three dark interior shots competes badly against one with twelve clear ones, whatever the price.

Then press Submit Listing.

What happens next

Your listing does not go live immediately, and that is deliberate — it is the reason a Mercala listing is worth more than a classified ad.

• Submitted — you get a confirmation email and the listing appears under My Listings as pending.
• Reviewed — someone at Mercala reads it against the documents you attached. They can leave notes on individual fields.
• Accepted — you get an email, and a Publish button appears on the listing.
• Changes requested — the email tells you what needs attention, and the form reopens with the flagged fields marked. Fix them and resubmit.

Nothing reaches the public site until you press Publish yourself. Acceptance makes publishing possible; it does not do it for you.

The Mercala Verified badge

Accepted and Verified are not the same outcome, and the difference goes back to the very first thing this guide said: a listing can be claimed, or it can be verified. Every submission that passes review gets accepted and can go live. Verified is a step further — the reviewer checked your ownership documents specifically (the Land Registry Extract, Title Deed, Owner Identification, Mandate Contract, Building extract) and confirmed the person listing the property actually has the standing to sell it.

You cannot request Verified directly — it is the reviewer's call, made from the documents you attached in Steps 1 through 3. This is the practical reason those uploads are worth the extra few minutes: a Verified listing carries a signal a merely-Accepted one does not, and buyers can tell the two apart at a glance.

Once granted, the badge follows the listing everywhere it appears — search results, the map, the table view, and your own listing page — not just the one place you happened to check.

After it is live: keeping it honest

Once published, you never see the long form again. Your listing row carries a small set of controls instead, and each one writes straight through to the live listing:

• View — your own copy of the listing, always reachable, whatever its status.
• Status — move between Active and Pending. Choosing Closed on a sale opens a short form to record what it actually sold for.
• Asking price — change the number. The old price is kept, and the listing shows its price history, so a reduction reads as a reduction rather than appearing from nowhere.
• Withdraw — take the property off Mercala without claiming it sold. Nothing is deleted; you can put it back on the market by setting the status to Active.

The distinction between Closed and Withdrawn matters, and it is worth getting right. Closing a sale records a real transaction and asks for the price, because that is what makes Aruba's sold-property data mean anything. Withdrawing claims no sale and asks for no price. Please do not record a sale that did not happen to get a listing off the site — Withdraw is there precisely so you never need to.

That last rule is the one most worth internalising. On most portals, a property you find might have sold two years ago and nobody took the page down. The whole point of listing here is that a buyer who contacts you about your property is contacting you about a property that is genuinely, currently, for sale.