Knock Knock

Knock Knock gets rid of the need for future renters to have to individually knock on doors by providing indication of whether the current tenants are resigning as well as other fun and helpful info.

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Inspiration

The Ann Arbor housing laws don't allow landlords to ask if students are resigning their lease until 150 days before the lease term is up although they still allow potential renters to sign pre-lease agreements. This means that potential renters are forced to knock on individual doors around Ann Arbor to ask if the tenants are resigning. This is a massive inconvenience for both tenants and potential renters so we set out to make this interaction quick and online.

What it does

Our website allows current tenants to fill out a quick form (neighborhood noise, neighborhood party scene, and resigning status) and displays that information for the potential renters to browse.

How we built it

We build the website in HTML, CSS, and JS and used Flask for navigation and running python scripts. We also used a web scraping API to get real time Zillow data to display the current listings. We also used a map API and address search API to allow users to search for rental properties and visualize their location.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into so many challenges but here are our three main ones. For a long time we could only get our data to show up on one of our teammate's computers and only on Microsoft Edge. We found out that this was simply because we all needed to clear the cache on Google Chrome before running the website. We also struggled with our Zillow scraping API because it only allowed for 100 requests before we had to pay. We found the best way around this was to save one of the requests in a json file and simply read from that file whenever we were testing. Lastly, none of us have had experience with Flask so getting used to the different way you have to navigate around the website was a bit of a learning curve and caused a lot of delays.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely happy that we were able to get so many different technologies to work together in this project. Most of us only have experience coding in one language at a time so being able to mix languages and call on API's was a really fun challenge.

What we learned

We learned Flask from scratch and improved our HTML, CSS, and JS skills a lot. We also got more comfortable using API's and figuring out how to integrate them into our website.

What's next for Knock Knock

We had trouble getting the information from our form to show up with our listings. This is a crucial feature that we unfortunately couldn't finish and would be a next step for us. We are also super close to having a fully working backend database in Firebase. This would allow the information on the site to be saved between visits and would definitely be one of our next steps.

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