Fanua

Inspiration

Our city of Dublin, CA has a plethora of residential, vacant, and commercial land, and the economy of the city is dependent heavily on the real estate industry. With small businesses struggling during the pandemic, we realized that these sectors intersect significantly. Keeping this in mind, we decided to research this industry and attempted to facilitate its processes through an application that would streamline real estate networking and co-investing.

What it does

We built a mobile application that connects fellow investors who are interested in co-investing in properties. Through our messaging system and property search filters, users are able to locate and invest in properties with ease, as well as contact fellow investors on the application. Users can also use the data visualization to see trends in the housing market and property price predictions. Using these features, users can determine when the appropriate time to buy a property is in a certain region or county.

How we built it

The frontend was built in Dart using the Flutter software development kit. We created custom widgets and animations to use through the app so the user experience would be simple and elegant. The backend was built using a Python Web Server and Firebase. The Python Web Server was created using the Flask framework and retrieves real estate data from the Realtor API. We also use statistical analysis on the property data to find the average house price and a convolutional neural network to predict future property prices. The Firebase was used for encrypted messaging services and user authorization. It also stores user info and property data.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of trouble with the messaging system and updating the messages in real-time between users since we didn’t want the users to refresh the page each time a new message was sent. We also had some problems with querying data from the API and updating the data on user requests such as filtering the properties.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of our real-time Firebase messaging system which we integrated into our Flutter application. We were also really happy with the data analysis we conducted on our properties and provided users with graphical data as well as property information based on the user’s geolocation.

What we learned

Over the course of this hackathon, we learned how to use Python web servers efficiently to acquire data from the Realtor API and implement it in Fafoo Investments. We also learned how to integrate Firebase into our Flutter Application.

What's next for Fanua

We hope to further develop our real estate app so that it displays information about the nearby demographics, school ratings, and local properties purchased. Additionally, we plan on adding more investment properties to our application that are located outside of the United States. Through non-U.S. properties, international investors will be able to connect with each other and co-invest.