Property Captain: The Easy Way to Rate your Home!

A no non-sense real-estate tool that analyzes properties within an area and returns its analytical rating to the user about whether the property is worth the price based on a variety of factors.

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Inspiration:

The inspiration of our project was really focused on the real estate market in Toronto, and the lack of transparency between the seller, to listing company to the buyer. We really just wanted to create a user-friendly tool that will help new home buyers from making a wrong decision under the pressure that is time, as real estate is snagged up quickly in the current atmosphere.

What it does:

With a combination of web design knowledge, mathematical algorithms, and mapping APIs, we used our skill set and knowledge, to create a web-based map which displays houses and all relevant information in the Toronto area. However, unlike sites such as Zillow, or Realtor.ca, we don't leave our consumers in the dark by feeding them endless information. We take all the relevant information which adds or detracts to the value of a home and create a rating out of 100. Our algorithm takes into account price per square foot, the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, parking, pool(s), and garage space to take the confusion out of home buying!

How we built it:

  1. Used UIPath in order to scrape for relevant information regarding properties in the Toronto area
  2. Began to sort and input all the relevant information into a mapping API to display on our website
  3. Used JavaScript, HTML and CSS to design a website
  4. Designed and tested a mathematical algorithm to determine a rating associated to each property based on relevant data

Challenges we faced:

One of the main challenges that we ran into while developing this tool was figuring out how to approach the algorithm and how to account the multitude of factors that go into purchasing a home (e.g. location, amenities, size, material) while also making the information easy to digest. It took a few attempts, but in the end, we arrived at a metric that we are comfortable presenting the public at large.

Accomplishments:

Considering that three out of four of us have are first-timers and none of us have used APIs before, we are proud of the work that we put out there. We also believed the website and map itself are well designed. And the rating algorithm is far more accurate than we first hoped it would be. Overall we did our best and think we have something pretty cool to show for it.

Things we learned:

Teamwork :) We for a much better understanding of how APIs work and how to actually implement them properly.

What's next for Property Captain: The Easy Way to Rate your Home!

  • An improved mathematical algorithm that increases the accuracy of the results through introducing new factors and improving on previously added ones
  • Expanding and fully automating its services to quickly cover a larger array of properties across multiple cities
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