Home Quest

About the Project 🚀

Inspiration 💡

Life goes forward - a one way trip. Impactful decisions should be made consciously, since they are irreversible. One of them is the decision where to settle down. For many people and young professionals homeownership feels impossible. It’s unclear what is affordable, what choices matter, and how life events and savings can impact financial plans.

We wanted to create an interactive, visual, and enriching experience — complementing boring number-based financial planning. It allowed us to find a way to raise awareness for the road toward homeownership and the longevity + perseverance it takes.

Our approach tries to unify ideas from:

Board games like Monopoly
one directional life simulators
Rigorous financial planning

We wanted users to be aware of their journey and progress towards a potential future home.

What it Does 🛠️

Home Quest is an interactive, game-style platform that simulates realistic financial and housing decisions.

Users can:

Create a financial profile based on their income and savings 💰
Simulate life events like promotions, children or unexpected changes 🕺
Explore the impact on real property listings throughout Germany 🇩🇪
Visually track their progress towards homeownership 📊

Each decision dynamically updates:

Their timeline ⏳
Their buying power 💪
Their available housing options 🏡🔍

How We Built It 🧑‍💻

We built HomeQuest as a full-stack web application.

Our stack included:

Frontend: React incl. Dynamic Caching
Backend: Python FastAPI connecting to Property Search API + Budget Calculator API
Database: SQLite

Challenges We Ran Into 🧗‍♂️

The main challenges were:

API Limitations: no price filters, access speed
Efficient Storage Logic: scalable data handling, improved frontend response time
Integrating rigorous financial calculations into a gamified experience
Creating a simplistic and intuitive UI (and cutting out potential but useless features)

What We Learned 📚

Through building Home Quest, we learned:

FastAPI Integration
Prototyping and continuous improvement of a full-stack application in short time
The difficulty of innovating in digital real estate market due to data scarcity

And especially

Cooking code and trying to survive really late at night.

What’s Next for Home Quest ⁉️

This project might provide some ideas for further

Dynamic caching of the interhyp Property Search API
Data-driven classification of potential housings for clients

Being the first Hackathon from all the team members it was actually really tough, especially to push through and to finish in time. But glad for the chance though and for you hosting the challenge.