Rate My Philly Landlord

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Inspiration

We’ve all used sites like RateMyProfessor to scope out teachers, but when it comes to renting in Philly, it’s a total gamble. We wanted to build something for students and locals to share real landlord experiences so people don’t end up stuck with a nightmare lease.

What it does

Rate My Philly Landlord is a review site just for Philly renters. You can look up landlords by neighborhood, read reviews, and even see the actual building in Google Street View. Reviews can be anonymous, and you can bookmark ones to come back to later.

How we built it

Backend: Python FastAPI with SQLite. We set up a clean REST API, seeded it with fake data for testing, and deployed it on Railway.
Frontend: Next.js 15 with TypeScript + Tailwind. We leaned on shadcn/ui for consistency and made it client-side rendered so the auth state and interactions feel smooth.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up neighborhood-specific search without it feeling clunky.
Getting the Google Maps Street View API working properly.
Balancing between making it lightweight but still feature-rich.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a working system up fast that actually feels modern (not like a 2010 rental site).
Built filters for real Philly neighborhoods instead of generic “city” tags.
The animations and design look clean without being distracting.

What we learned

How to wire up Google Maps APIs and integrate them into a Next.js frontend.
How important seeding fake data is for testing when you don’t have real user content yet.
That focusing on one city makes it way easier to design useful features.