Houst

Inspiration

Sites like daft.ie and rent.ie are where nearly everyone in Ireland looks for a place to live. The cost of living crisis has made that search harder. The advertised price often isn't what you actually pay once fees, bills and deposits are counted. Listings are also hard to judge from a photo and a headline. We wanted renters, and students in particular, to see what a place really costs and where it really is.

What it does

Houst is an accommodation search platform for Cork.

• Search and filter listings by name, location and price.
• Truth price: it shows the true monthly cost of a place, not just the headline rent.
• Map and street view: each listing has an OpenStreetMap location and a street-level view, so you can see the area before you visit.
• Clean listing pages that make places easy to compare.

How we built it

We built it as a React and TypeScript web app styled with Tailwind CSS and the HeroUI v3 component library. The maps integrated into our application use OpenStreetMap, which is free and open source. We worked in short feature branches and pull requests: the truth-price logic first, then the landing page overhaul, then the map and search fixes.

Challenges we ran into

• Defining "truth price" in a way that is accurate and still simple to read.
• Getting listing data into a consistent shape.
• Embedding maps and street views without hurting page performance.
• Doing all of it, including design polish, within the hackathon's time limit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A working end-to-end search, from landing page to listing detail.
• The truth-price feature, which gives renters a cost they can trust.
• A polished landing page and UI built in a short time.
• Free, open map data instead of a paid API.

What we learned

• How much renters' decisions depend on hidden costs.
• How to build quickly with HeroUI v3 and Tailwind v4.
• How to work with open geo data.
• How to split a hackathon project into small PRs that can ship independently.

What's next for Houst

• Live listings from landlords and agencies, rather than seeded data.
• Saved searches, price alerts and shortlists.
• Commute-time and neighbourhood scores (transport, shops, campus distance).
• Landlord and listing verification to fight scams.
• Expansion from Cork to Dublin, Galway and Limerick.

Built With

• algorithms
• backend
• cool
• docker
• drizzle
• framework
• frontend
• node.js
• openstreetmap
• playwright
• react
• sqlite
• typescript
• vite