HawkHousing

Landing page
Profile
"Find your roommate" tab
AI-powered 3 top matches for housing
HawkHousing student view; properties listed on HawkHousing
Top-match property with AI-matching percentage and advice
Regular property
HawkHousing weekly promo email
HawkHousing's Landlord Dashboard
"Create a property listing" tab for landlords

Inspiration

Finding off-campus housing can be challenging for both students and landlords.

Students often have to navigate scattered listings while comparing properties, locations, prices, and living arrangements. At the same time, finding a place to live is only part of the process: for many students, finding the right people to live with can be just as important.

Landlords also face the challenge of reaching students and presenting their properties in a way that makes relevant information easy to discover and compare.

At Lehigh University (where the original team was created; I was not part of it), I saw an opportunity to explore these connected problems through a single platform. This led us to develop HawkHousing, a web-based MVP that combines housing discovery and roommate matching into one experience. Instead of treating finding a home and finding roommates as separate processes, HawkHousing explores how the two can work together.

What we built

HawkHousing is a web-based MVP designed to connect college students with off-campus housing while helping them discover potential roommates.

Students can explore properties through a map-based interface, compare listings, view property tags and pros and cons, and discover housing based on distance from campus. The MVP also includes a short five-question survey designed to generate potential roommate matches based on student preferences.

For landlords, HawkHousing provides a way to showcase properties and make relevant information easier for students to discover. The MVP also explores both standard listings and subleasing as part of the housing search experience.

The main idea behind HawkHousing is to bring several parts of the off-campus housing journey into one place: discovering a property, considering where it is, and thinking about who you might live with.

This version represents the MVP 2.0, a more complete iteration of the concept that combines housing discovery and roommate matching rather than treating them as separate features.

How we built it

HawkHousing originally began as a Ruby on Rails application. For this iteration, we rebuilt the application around a more modular architecture. The frontend was developed using Next.js and Tailwind CSS, while the backend uses Flask and MySQL, with API-based communication connecting the different parts of the application. Rebuilding the project required us to rethink how the data was structured, how the frontend communicated with the backend, and how different user flows interacted with one another.

The MVP includes:

Map-based housing discovery
Property listings and subleasing
Property information and tags
Distance-to-campus discovery
A five-question roommate matching flow
Separate experiences for students and landlords
Sign-in-gated interactions

We focused on building a working foundation that could support future improvements rather than trying to solve every aspect of the housing market in a single iteration.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was transitioning from our original Ruby on Rails architecture to a new technology stack while preserving the functionality we had already explored.

This meant reconsidering our data structures, frontend workflows, API communication, and the relationships between different parts of the application. We were not simply rewriting the existing code; we had to make architectural decisions about how the MVP should work as a complete system.

Another challenge was designing for two different types of users.

Students need a simple way to discover housing and potential roommates, while landlords need a way to present their properties clearly to prospective tenants. Designing the experience meant considering both sides without making the interface unnecessarily complicated.

We also had to think carefully about how roommate matching should fit into the housing experience. We wanted matching to feel like a natural part of discovering where and with whom a student might live, rather than an isolated feature disconnected from the rest of the platform.

Throughout development, we continuously debugged, tested, and refined the experience while coordinating development across our team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of turning the original HawkHousing concept into a more complete MVP 2.0 during this iteration.

One of our main accomplishments was rebuilding the application around a new architecture using Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Flask, MySQL, and APIs. This gave us the opportunity to rethink how the different parts of the application work together.

We are also proud of bringing housing discovery and roommate matching into a single experience. Instead of requiring students to separately search for a property and then think about potential roommates, HawkHousing explores how both decisions can be considered together.

Most importantly, we were able to move beyond the initial concept and create a working prototype that demonstrates how the different pieces of the idea could fit together.

What we learned

HawkHousing taught me that building a product is about more than making individual features work. Rebuilding the application showed how important architecture becomes as a project grows. Working with the frontend, backend, APIs, database, and user flows as one system forced us to think about how technical decisions affect the entire experience.

We also learned that designing a marketplace requires considering multiple types of users at the same time. A feature that makes sense for a student may not provide the same value to a landlord, so the experience needs to account for both perspectives.

Finally, we learned that development is an iterative process. The direction of HawkHousing changed as we reconsidered the problem, tested different approaches, and identified limitations in the original architecture.

This MVP 2.0 is therefore not intended to represent a finished product. It represents what we were able to build, learn, and explore through this iteration.

What's next for HawkHousing

The next step for HawkHousing would be to validate the MVP with students and landlords and learn which parts of the experience are most useful to them. Based on that feedback, we could refine the housing discovery experience, improve the roommate matching system, and explore additional features that could make the process of finding housing and potential roommates more connected.

We would also want to investigate how the platform could adapt to the different housing needs of students at different universities.

For now, HawkHousing is a working MVP that demonstrates our approach to connecting students, landlords, and potential roommates in one housing experience. The next stage would be learning from real users and using that feedback to determine how the concept should evolve.