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Home page
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Group chat among memebers
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Dashboard
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Ai agent response
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Rent and payment screen
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Ai Agent
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Tenent ai agent
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Tenent page
Inspiration
Finding student housing in Dublin is already a notoriously grueling process of refreshing Daft.ie and dodging scams. But once you actually secure a room, a new nightmare begins: the chaos of shared student living. We’ve lived through the messy WhatsApp groups, the passive-aggressive messages over who left the heating on, and the utter confusion of splitting pro-rated winter electric bills among housemates with different move-in dates. We realized there was a massive trust gap in student tenancies. We built HouseKey to eliminate that friction, providing a single, verifiable ledger for landlords and student renters, powered by AI for total transparency, and settled securely by PayPal.
What it does
HouseKey is an intelligent shared-living ledger that gives students perfect financial clarity and gives landlords a headache-free management tool. For student tenants on tight budgets, transparency is everything. Instead of fighting with housemates or waiting days for a landlord to reply, a student can simply ask the HouseKey AI Assistant, "How is my rent calculated this month?" or "What's my share of the internet bill?" The AI provides a real-time, mathematically accurate breakdown based on their specific lease dates. When they are ready to settle up, students can instantly pay their exact share through an embedded PayPal checkout. For landlords managing student accommodations, HouseKey eliminates the endless cycle of chasing individual €20 utility transfers. The AI Assistant summarizes open disputes, tracks who is pending to pay, and updates the ledger in real-time the moment a tenant's PayPal transaction clears.
How we built it
We wanted a fast, lightweight, and accessible experience, so we built the frontend using React, TypeScript, and TailwindCSS. To power the financial engine, we integrated the PayPal Developer Platform. Knowing that students rely heavily on digital wallets, we utilized the PayPal Sandbox to build a frictionless, secure checkout flow directly inside the tenant dashboard. When a payment is processed, the backend ledger is instantly updated. For the AI integration, we engineered a strictly constrained, read-only agent layer. We designed the system prompt to dynamically ingest the property’s JSON ledger, including move-in dates, fixed rents, and split utilities. This allows the AI to act as an impartial mediator that accurately explains complex shared bills on the fly.
Challenges we ran into
When you are dealing with a student’s rent and deposit money, AI hallucinations are entirely unacceptable. A major technical hurdle was designing the context window and strict guardrails so the agent would only summarize the exact numerical ledger. We had to explicitly train the AI to reject any user attempts to alter balances or confirm unrecorded payments, ensuring it remained an impartial source of truth. Additionally, seamlessly passing the exact financial data from a conversational AI breakdown into the secure PayPal checkout required precise state management between the frontend and the payment gateway.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are incredibly proud of how consumer-ready the UX feels. Property management tools are usually designed only for massive corporate landlords, but HouseKey is built for the reality of shared student living. Bridging a conversational AI agent with hard-number financial APIs, and watching a test student seamlessly query their pro-rated bill and pay it securely via PayPal in under 60 seconds, was a massive validation of our idea.
What we learned
Building HouseKey gave us a deep dive into the PayPal developer ecosystem, particularly how to embed a secure checkout experience without pulling users out of the app. We also learned how difficult but rewarding it is to ground Large Language Models in rigid financial data, formatting complex variables (like moving dates and split ratios) into a structure the AI could reliably interpret and explain to a stressed tenant.
What's next for HouseKey
We want to evolve HouseKey into the ultimate safety net for student renters. Next steps include expanding our PayPal integration to handle automated split payouts, such as automatically routing deposit refunds at the end of a lease. We also plan to expand the AI's capabilities to ingest and summarize lease agreements for local RTB (Residential Tenancies Board) compliance, and introduce AI-driven scam detection to protect international students before they even sign a lease.
