Inspiration

Here is a Devpost writeup you can paste in as-is. It matches what the site actually does.

Inspiration Choosing where to live at Temple is harder than it should be. The official housing site lists buildings and prices, but it does not tell you what it is actually like to live there: whether the elevators back up before class, whether a hall is loud on weekends, or whether an off-campus lease hides extra fees. Rate My Professor already does this for classes. We wanted the same thing for dorms and apartments, so current and incoming students can hear from people who have already lived there.

We are both freshmen, and this was our first hackathon. Housing was one of the first big decisions we had to make, so it felt like a problem we understood.

What it does RateMyHousing is a site for Temple students, and for people thinking about coming to Temple, to browse, compare, and review on-campus and off-campus housing around Main Campus.

The home page has a search bar, live stats, the top-rated places, and the newest reviews. Browse Housing shows every place as a card with its score, price, walk time, and review count. You can search, filter by on campus, off campus, or freshman-friendly, and sort by rating, price, or distance. Each building has its own page with a description, room types, amenities, a rating breakdown, and student reviews. Ratings cover cleanliness, location, value, management, and quietness, plus an overall score and whether the reviewer would recommend it. The Reviews page is a feed of every review, with filters for campus type and high or low scores. Anyone can write a review, and it can be anonymous. The Pricing page compares semester dorm rates and monthly apartment rent on one monthly scale, and a budget calculator shows whether a place fits what you can spend. It also lists costs people forget, like meal plans, deposits, and utility caps. The Housing Guide covers the application timeline, on-campus versus off-campus tradeoffs, a move-in checklist, and common questions. Prices are estimates for the demo. The site says so, and it links to official Temple housing pages.

How we built it We built it with Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, using shadcn/ui for buttons, dialogs, dropdowns, and tables. The look uses Temple cherry on a light background, with green, yellow, and red score colors so a rating is obvious at a glance.

Housing and starter reviews live in data files, so the site is not empty during a demo. New reviews are saved in the browser with localStorage, which means they stay after a refresh on that computer. We split the work so we would not edit the same files: one of us owned browsing, reviews, and the review form, and the other owned the home page, pricing, the guide, and the housing list.

The project is on GitHub at https://github.com/ali1toxirov/ratemyhousing.

Challenges we ran into This was our first time building a real website, so a lot of the challenge was learning the tools while using them.

We kept running into framework details we had not seen before. Next.js 16 types its routes in a specific way, and mixing a browser component with a server component broke the build until we moved the shared menu into its own file. Reviews were the hardest product decision. A shared database would let everyone see the same reviews, but setting one up in a weekend was more than we could finish. Saving reviews in the browser let us demo writing and reading a review live, with the tradeoff that other people do not see those reviews yet. Comparing prices fairly was messy. Dorms are billed per semester and apartments per month, and "utilities included" often has a cap. We converted everything to a monthly estimate and called out the costs that do not show up in the rent. Getting the code onto GitHub took longer than writing a page. A small typo in the GitHub username made the first push fail even though the login worked. Accomplishments that we're proud of We showed up as freshmen with an idea and left with a site that looks and works like a real product, not a single page with placeholder text. You can search, filter, open a building, read a rating breakdown, submit a review and see it appear, and run a budget through the calculator. It also works on a phone, including the collapsed menu.

We are also proud that we organized the work before we started coding. Owning separate files, and writing down who does what, kept us from stepping on each other. The copy is specific to Temple, from Morgan Hall and 1300 to rowhouse shares and the walk to the Bell Tower, instead of generic "student housing" text.

What we learned We learned how a modern web app is put together: a page is a folder, reusable pieces are components, and styling can live in small class names instead of a giant CSS file. We learned that TypeScript catches mistakes before the page breaks, and that git only stays peaceful if two people do not edit the same file.

We also learned to scope a hackathon project. A shared login and database would have been impressive, but a complete path from search to review was more useful to finish and demo. Stopping feature work near the end and testing the flows we already had mattered more than adding one more page.

What's next for RateMyHousing The next step is a real database so a review written on one laptop shows up for everyone. After that, we want Temple login so reviews come from students, photos of each building, and a map with a pin for every place. We would also fact-check every price against Temple Housing and the property managers, add a side-by-side compare view, and let reviewers tag a place with things like "quiet" or "good AC."