rate-my-lease

A RateMyProfessor style website where users can easily locate, review, and lease for housing units in the Davis area.

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Inspiration

At the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, there was a rush of students moving back home from their off campus housing leases. Many students were looking for people to take over their leases and subleases, and many social media platforms like Wildfire and Facebook were flooded by posts like these. As vaccines for COVID-19 are slowly being rolled out, and as the university begins making plans to resume in person classes, there will be a large influx of students looking for housing in the Davis area. Currently, information about housing is very messy and scattered: trying to find a comprehensive source of information on all housing is nearly impossible. Further, it is difficult to know how the housing is, without actually seeing the house itself, and connecting with past tenants about housing information like how the staff was, what the interior is like, and overall experience is difficult.

What it does

Rate my lease is a platform that offers a convenient way to search for off campus housing around the UC Davis area. We aim to connect current students with alumni of UC Davis and house/apartment renters, and help everyone find quality and affordable housing. Users of this website can search and filter for available leases and find one that suits their price range, minimum rating tolerance, and bed/bath count. Users can also submit a new lease or submit a new review on any given address.

How we built it

We used MongoDB as our database storage and express as our backend server. Our frontend runs on React.js, and stylizing components were mainly extracted from Ant Design. The big component in our project was using Google Maps API. We were able to store locations in our backend and dynamically render them as markers on our map, as well as use their Geocoding API and Autofill API to ensure correct and valid addresses. Additionally, we implemented a search functionality and filter so the user is able to look for a specific address to read reviews or find leases based on price range, bed and bath number, and minimum average review for a lease location.

Challenges we ran into

While building this project, it was a lot of work figuring out API’s such as Google maps and Google autocomplete and how it would work with our project vision. It took us trial and error and even reconfigurations of our project to have every component working together as we intended. Additionally, because our project was full stack, we split up the frontend and backend work within our group and had to communicate how we wanted the data to be sent and received. Querying data based on frontend input was surprisingly difficult. We had to standardize formatting and handle edge cases given varying user input.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Implementing Google-cloud Maps API
  • Drawing a custom icon
  • Figuring out how to rebuild our map with a different library due to our faulty initial one.
  • Communicating a front-end with a back-end and a database
  • Learning to make efficient database calls
  • Learning clever ways to manipulate state components and rerendering
  • Making a pleasant user experience using ant-design
  • Fully utilizing the capabilities of asynchronous programming

What we learned

  • MERN full stack development
  • Asynchronous programming
  • UI/UX design
  • Querying
  • Github
  • Communication and coding with others

What's next for rate-my-lease

  • Profile and login feature
  • Automatically re-rendering upon lease and review submission
  • Lease and review verifications
  • Replies for each review and lease
  • Like and dislike for reviews
  • Implementing more efficient backend querying
  • Animate the zoom, and auto lock location on the map
  • Implement so users can only and are emphasized to only post addresses of housing in the Davis area
  • Extend the application to other schools and regions

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