HillFinder

Landing Page
Home Page
Rental Listings

Inspiration

As first years applying for housing next year, we felt the process was stressful and disorganized, even when we are only looking at ACC apartments. When the time comes for us to look for off-campus housing, this problem will only worsen, with even more apartment listings across Irvine with different prices, floor plans, and surroundings.

We addressed these problems with HillFinder, an app to assist UCI students in finding the off-campus apartment of their dreams using various APIs.

What it does

HillFinder consolidates information about different apartments into one place.

You select your preferences for your housing, such as how comfortable you are with paying a higher price, how many rooms you're comfortable with, and even if you like boba. HillFinder then presents you with 6 possible apartments for you, taking into account your preferences and allowing you to compare prices, distance from campus, and distance from nearest boba shop for each apartment.

How we built it

For the frontend, we used HTML, CSS, and JS

For the backend, we used Flask and Python to interact with Zillow Webscraper API, Yelp API, and Google Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

Our entire team was new to full-stack development, which caused issues especially with choosing what technology to use. Initially, we wanted to create an application that uses React for the front end and Flask for the backend, but we found that learning React was too difficult for the amount of time we had. We ended up just sticking with HTML, JS, and CSS for the front end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how polished our product is, especially with how inexperienced we all were initially, both with the technologies we used and with Hackathons. We were able to have most of the planned functionality while also including loading screens and landing pages, which is an accomplishment none of us thought we would achieve.

What we learned

As beginners, all of us have learned so much about full-stack development, becoming more adjusted to working with HTML, CSS, JS, and Python.

What's next for HillFinder

In the future, we would like to finish the filtering and maybe also add a few new criteria to filter by. We could also add a way to save apartments that the user finds interesting to compare them. Also, links could be added to the listings to allow the users to easily get more info about the apartment.