house.inc

welcome home
find roommates
find faster with AI

Inspiration

We were inspired by how realtors and housing agents help families find homes by working with their specific needs. A good housing agent understands a home-owner's requirements and makes sure they're comfortable with the space, the neighborhood and the distance before suggesting properties to look at. When renting, it can be exhausting pouring through websites by yourself, especially under special circumstances like when you have pets, need wheelchair accessibility or wish to live with a roommate. Using AI can help make the process more human and enable people to find better housing faster.

What it does

Our website is a one-stop-shop for all housing rentals, primarily targeted at college towns. Users can find housing using AI to filter listings, sign up to meet roommates and create listings if they have roommates moving out.

How we built it

For the backend, we used Java Spring Boot, which gave us a solid base for developing reliable and scalable services. On the frontend, we picked React because its component-based structure and high performance helped us create dynamic and responsive user interfaces. We used a mySQL database for data storage and retrieval because of its strong querying capabilities and support for complex transactions.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the development process, we faced several challenges. One of the major hurdles was enabling our AI bot to access updated data, as the data would constantly change based on user interactions. Another challenge we ran into was training our bot and making sure it was in sync with our database and the user's preferences.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Supporting a variety of features that someone looking for housing would expect to use.

What we learned

Designing a connected system with multiple types of users can be challenging. Careful system design is essential to ensure smooth development in the long term.

What's next for house.inc

Implement support for more housing criteria like accessibility standards, parking, etc. Allow users to favorite listings and come back to them on their accounts.