Inspiration
Finding housing online is fragmented across platforms with no easy way to talk to other interested renters or buyers. We wanted to combine maps, live chat, and scraped listings into one social, real-time experience.
What it does
Housemates is a chat-integrated housing finder. Users search by city/radius, see scraped listings from Zillow & FB Marketplace with price/address/source, mark interest (public/private), and chat via global, city, group, or direct messages.
How we built it
We used the Google Maps API for geolocation, map rendering, and radius-based search. A backend aggregation layer collects and normalizes housing data from external sources (Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, and similar listing platforms where possible).
The chat system is built as a real-time messaging layer supporting global, city-specific, and listing-specific rooms. User profiles and listing interactions are stored in a database that links users, properties, and chat groups together. The frontend integrates chat UI and listing cards into a unified interface.
Challenges we ran into
Since different housing platform APIs structure their data differently or restrict API access, it was difficult to aggregate the data consistently, so we ended up only using a Zillow API key from RapidAPI. Another major challenge was syncing real-time chat with dynamic listing-based groups without creating fragmented or duplicate chat rooms.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We combined two separated systems, housing search and social messaging, into one unified platform where users can find others within local proximity to find housing together. The multi-platform housing API data extraction attests to the complexity of our website, which can be scaled with more housing marketplace APIs.
What we learned
We learned how complex real-world data integration can be when pulling from multiple platforms with inconsistent or restricted APIs. We also gained experience designing real-time chat systems that scale across different scopes (global, regional, and object-specific like listings).
On the product side, we learned how powerful it is to merge decision-making tools with social feedback loops.
What's next for Housemates
Hopefully we can increase the security of the user login authentication and add additional APIs for web scraping, so that even more platforms can be used for house searching on Housemates.
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