Home inSights

Find homes with transparent data and community insights. Home inSights empowers decisions with unbiased property data, genuine discussions, robust market analysis tools and ironclad privacy.

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Inspiration

The journey of creating Home inSights began with a personal struggle. Like many others, I found myself navigating the tumultuous waters of the current housing market. Over the course of a year, my wife and I made 10 offers, toured dozens of homes, and combed through hundreds of listings. Each time we came up short, a realization grew stronger: the existing tools weren't truly serving homebuyers and homeowners.

In Portland, ME, where I was searching, home prices had surged by 85% and mortgage costs had tripled in just five years. This wasn't just a local phenomenon, but part of a nationwide crisis marked by limited supply, skyrocketing prices, and escalating borrowing costs. As a CFA charter holder with a background in mortgage-backed securities along with a deep understanding of markets and valuations, I felt compelled to make a difference.

The spark for Home inSights came from a desire to empower buyers and homeowners with personalized insights, community discussion, and smart comparison tools. I wanted to create an app that prioritized the needs of consumers over lead generation, breaking down the information asymmetry that exists in the current market.

What it does

Currently, the application provides users with market trends, price history like percentage sold above and below list, mortgage calculations and comparison, and the ease of searching for public records.

How we built it

I built this by using AI to help me write code as I had never written code before. I specifically used Claude and Chat GPT4 to help in the development of it.

I first started by asking the models to make a mortgage calculator app with lots of requirements that the models suggested. I put it into Xcode and found a million errors. So I went back and re-started focusing on how to take an input, then how to make a calculation, then how to stylize the UI and so on from there.

After learning how to make a front end, I moved onto back end development and spent four days wrangling setting up a local environment with python and postgreSQL. I knew how to structure data and found that I was going to be faster at building my backend by using Airtable and other low/no code tools.

After setting up a backend that tracked the full lifecycle of transactions, I moved onto connecting the two and revamping the user experience to follow examples of top map based apps like AllTrails.

Challenges and learnings

All along the way, I ran into technical challenges and learned:

  • How to move from a single file to multiple files
  • how to write to a data model
  • how to make a better architecture like MVVM and re-organize my files
  • how to use github
  • how to set up authentication
  • how to set up paywalls
  • how to send information between front end and backend
  • How to make reusable components
  • how to troubleshoot and analyze code to determine sources of problems
  • How to effectively prompt LLM models for coding! It has been a real journey in setting up my work and better understanding my code to then better explain context to the models

I also ran into non-development related challenges:

  • How to create videos showing off development
  • How to create specific content related to homes when we were building more of a game
  • I wasn't as good with using LLMs to create design prompts because they would put in out of scope requirements/requests that would throw off human designers and were sometimes harder to recognize

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. I am proud that I've released a mobile app and have several subscribers supporting me now and have gotten my projects in the hands of multiple people
  2. I am proud of connecting with other people about this project
  3. I am proud that I've been able to learn new technologies like AI along with front end and backend development

What's next for Home inSights

  1. Commenting - I have a big family that is always talking about local real estate, we want to move this into the app
  2. Comparative Market Analysis tool - Friends and family want to better track their home values with recent sales and have a choice over comps.
  3. Personalized searches - Friends and family who are more actively searching for homes want to set more specialized parameters for unique homes and don't want to set a bunch of filters.
  4. Expanding markets - Currently, I've been focusing on just a single market and once more of the business an product is built, I have a list of other markets with interested users to begin using.
  5. App tooling and user management - at the right moments I plan to add in crashlytics, CRM, some event tracking, paywall testing, and other tools to make this app more of a professional product

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