NestMapper-NYC

Result front page

Inspiration

Apartment hunting across New York's five boroughs can be difficult, with many factors influencing what type of place a person finds suitable to live in. With NYC being so diverse and having a multitude of neighborhood options, it can be overwhelming to find the ideal place to live.

What it does

NestMapper NYC lets users specify up to eight preferences: monthly rent, bedroom count, pet allowance, safety priority, transportation, lifestyle & amenities, preferred borough, and commute destination. Users can also add any required amenities and other specific preferences in a free-text box. After clicking "Analyze My Best Match," the app displays the top three neighborhood matches — each with a match percentage, estimated rent, an explanation of why it's a good fit, and any tradeoffs to consider — plus an AI-generated summary of the top recommendation.

How we built it

For the frontend, we used JavaScript, Next.js, React, and Tailwind CSS. For the backend, we used the Gemini API (via a Google AI Studio key) with the Gemini 3.6 model. JSON is used to send user preferences to the backend and return recommendation results to the frontend. We also used AI tools including ChatGPT, Claude, and Codex to help us build and debug.

Challenges we ran into

Finalizing our project idea and determining exactly what result we wanted the web application to produce
Merging our UI (frontend) branch with the main branch

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a fully functional, deployed web application that takes real user preferences and returns AI-generated, structured neighborhood recommendations — all within a single hack day, with most of our team collaborating on a technical project like this for the first time.

What we learned

Having a thorough plan and idea is important before implementing a project
Communication and collaboration among team members is essential
Understanding how to use outside resources and tools helps with research and debugging
How to incorporate the Gemini API key into our project
How to resolve Git conflicts

What's next for NestMapper NYC

Include 2-3 specific apartment addresses alongside each neighborhood recommendation
Use a database with real NYC apartment housing information
Include a commute distance preference

Limitations & Tradeoffs

We are not using a separate database or dataset of NYC apartment housing information to match specific apartments to user preferences. We did not include a commute distance preference for how far someone is willing to live from school, work, etc. Due to API key limitations, actual apartment addresses are not shown in the neighborhood recommendation results.