Caza de Casa

An Airbnb alternative for finding furnished apartments in Medellín in Colombia

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Inspiration

When my girlfriend and I arrived to Medellín in Colombia we noticed that there was no real alternative to Airbnb for tourists who were looking to stay here.

There were plenty of real estate websites in Spanish for those seeking an apartment in Colombia to rent but none in English and which focused on their booming tourist market which has more than 2.5 million non-resident visitors.

This was a huge frustration for my girlfriend and I and so we resulted to searching on private Facebook groups for foreigners in Medellín which had a lot of posts from real estate agents and property owners advertising their property to rent.

This hinted to me that there was a problem that was waiting for a solution. If there was a good enough alternative to Airbnb there wouldn't be anywhere near the same volume of posts advertising apartments to rent on these groups.

Given the amount of times I heard people venting their frustrations about Airbnb from digital nomads and foreigners I met at language exchanges, coworks and coffee shops, this gave me further encouragement to bring my idea to reality.

I created a quick MVP demo as a Flutter Web project and then demo'd it to two individuals working in the real estate industry here in Medellín. They loved the demo and agreed there was a gap in the market and room for an alternative to Airbnb.

When I seen the Ship-A-Ton competition, I pivoted the project from being a web app and focusing on being mobile first.

What it does

It connects those who are seeking to find apartments to rent to the real estate agents and property owners seeking to rent out their properties.

How we built it

Initially gathered data from public real estate websites to build our initial database of apartments and then focused on building out the UI with a focus on web first which was our initial target platform as it's quickly accessible and would be easy for people browsing Facebook Groups to look at.

Challenges we ran into

Dealing with different sets of data from different real estate companies, some were extensive in the amount of features they had listed and others offered very little information.

All of these features needed to be translated into English to be displayed in the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building what we feel is a great alternative to Airbnb and has in-app subscription to generate us revenue

What we learned

  1. How to use Supabase OTP authentication
  2. Setting up Supabase email templates
  3. How to use RevenueCat's APIs to offer in-app subscriptions
  4. How to generate a demo video with AI voiceover
  5. Deploying a Jaspr website as a landing page to Firebase Hosting
  6. Creating an app logo with Pixlr
  7. Displaying a PDF file inside of a mobile app
  8. Opening up WhatsApp and pre-filling the message to a specific number with text
  9. Static Maps from Google Maps API using Flutter
  10. Tap to open Google Maps centred at a specific point without giving away co-ordinates

What's next for Caza de Casa

The rest of the year will be spent focusing on the following:

  • Releasing the iOS version of the app
  • Gathering feedback from user testing with new people seeking apartments at coffee shops, coworks and language exchanges
  • Adding more apartments
  • Adding a way to filter apartments by price, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, size of apartment and must have features
  • Building a way to review apartments pending approval to be added to the platform
  • Building host functionality letting property owners and real estate agents add their properties to the platform and preview how it will look in the app before it goes live
  • Building featured apartments to let local real estate businesses advertise their properties to rent
  • Improving my Spanish to the point I can pitch the app in Spanish in front of people who work at local real estate businesses here in Medellín
  • Demoing the app to more people working in the real estate industry here in Medellín
  • Building web version of the platform

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