DawgDen

Okay so we all literally have housing horror stories as college students. And honestly being international students made it so much worse, we didn't know our rights, didn't understand lease terms, and had no community to ask. Craigslist scams, confusing lease clauses, landlords keeping deposits for no reason we've been through all of it. We had zero protection and zero guidance when we were looking for housing for the first time in a completely new country. So we built DawgDen because we were just tired of it. Fun fact students lose over $500 a year on average to wrongful deposit withholding. That's insane and we wanted to do something about it.

So DawgDen is basically everything we wished existed in one place, it has 9 features:

Student Listings Board - verified UW students post and browse housing directly, no scammers
Lease AI Reader - upload your lease PDF, AI flags illegal clauses and hidden fees in plain English in under 30 seconds
Landlord Trust Score - verified reviews stored on Solana blockchain so landlords literally cannot fake or delete them, analyzed by Gemma 4
Vicinity & Commute Map - real commute time to UWB plus nearby grocery, pharmacy and transit for any listing
True Cost Estimator - see the actual monthly cost of any listing including estimated utilities, commute and other expenses
Roommate Split Calculator - fair bill splitting with income-proportional options
Community Board - Reddit-style forum for housing questions and roommate search
Student Marketplace - seniors/graduated students will sell furniture and appliances to incoming students
Voice Assistant - voice search and lease reading powered by ElevenLabs

We did face some setbacks while building this project, like how the Auth0 v4 had breaking changes from v3 which meant we had to completely rewrite our auth layer halfway through. Next.js 16 also renamed middleware.ts to proxy.ts which caught us off guard. On top of that we were integrating 5 different AI and blockchain APIs while trying to keep the UX actually usable. DigitalOcean required a credit card during hackathon hours so we pivoted to Neon for the database without losing too much time. Basically everything that could go wrong did go wrong at midnight.

Honestly these two days taught us so much. We got way better at integrating multiple AI services and learned how to use Solana as a real trust mechanism immutability as an actual feature and not just a buzzword. Auth0 AI Agents was new for all of us and we figured a ton about it. And honestly Google Antigravity with Claude Code genuinely felt like building at 3x speed we'd use it again in a heartbeat. Most importantly we learned that building something you actually need makes all the difference when it's 3am and everything is broken.