RenterLoo

Renting in Waterloo has never been easier!

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Inspiration

Every year, more than 50,000 students at the University of Waterloo scramble to find housing and are rarely completely satisfied with their purchase. With no concrete platform to search for rentals, students, just like us, are often left unsatisfied paying thousands of dollars for a rental without being sure that they're receiving the best available deal and location for their needs.

What it does

RenterLoo is a platform that connects students with available housing in the region. With RenterLoo, students can purchase quick, smart and easy. This platform allows students to filter by location, dates and number of roommates, thus producing tailor-made search results that are recommended based on past residents and proximity to your campus. To top this off, our product offers enhanced web-scraping features which search the internet for accommodations posted to other sites. With RenterLoo, students can "favourite" accommodations that interest them and even "add to cart", thus allowing an easy way for students to keep track of their most promising options.

How we built it

As with any ideation session, our journey began with a brainstorming session. Here is how we took our idea from the E7 couches, to the whiteboard and beyond. 1) Mapped out the UI by, considering all the features we needed, and inspiring ourselves with some design ideas on online templates. 2) Decided on the perfect product name and logo. 3) Divided the tasks amongst the team. 4) Tackled the front end used React, Typescript, CSS and JavaScript. 5) Tackled the back end using python and AWS Lamda.

Challenges we ran into

  • Figuring out how to integrate React to dynamially link the front end and back end
  • Adhering to the time crunch and regularly reassessing our plan to ensure we would meet the deadline
  • Huge learning curve associated with using new tech stacks and persevering through all the errors they gave.
  • Working with AWS lambda to organize the backend data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team never takes no for an answer and this is what we are most proud of. No matter how little experience we had, prior to beginning this hackathon, we faced each problem head-on and persevered until we had tackled every multifacteed problem we faced. While this journey was far from straightforward and certainly entailed some trial and error, we remained unwavering in our commitment to learning. We leveraged one another's skills to ensure we reached our goal one step at a time.

What we learned

  • Learned that React is used to dynamically link the front-end and back-end in applications where data needs to be continually fetched and populated in real-time.
  • Learned how to collaborate efficiently when working in a time crunch.
  • We all learned a little bit about ourselves (strengths/weaknesses in the tech realm) and how to work together efficiently on a time constraint.
  • Learning how to use and run an API.

What's next for RenterLoo

As the next step for RenterLoo, we envision harnessing the power of AI to analyze insights from our users' frequent search patterns. This valuable data will enable us to proactively notify users whenever a new accommodation matching their preferences is added to our platform. Additionally, our AI-driven system will alert users if an accommodation they have in their cart is being considered by another user. These timely notifications will not only motivate users to make their bookings promptly but also ensure satisfaction for both buyers and sellers on our platform.

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