RentThe6ix

Rent the 6ix Homepage
Entering the Prompt
Entering the Prompt (Mobile)
Viewing the Suggested Listings
Viewing the Listing Page (1/2 & 2/2)
Viewing the Listing Page (1/2)
Viewing the Listing Page (2/2)

Inspiration

RentThe6ix - Toronto Home Finding Made Easy

Finding a good house is not easy and often annoying. Sometimes a house is too far, too expensive, in an unsafe neighborhood, and the constraints only continue from here. Instead of spending endless time exploring house listings across various websites, we built RentThe6ix, to solve this problem.

We have hosted our project RentThe6ix on the 6ix.casa domain name, which combines the terms 6ix, a term for downtown toronto and casa: spanish for home. This domain represents our project well because it combines our goals to foster users to find homes in Toronto, and making the process as personal, homefelt and easy as possible.

What it does

RentThe6ix takes the user's prompt, and deeply understands the user's preferences and priorities towards housing, and scrapes the internet to find places for rent that allign well with their needs.

Beyond just matching places with a given price, RentThe6ix goes above and beyond, and targets the bigger picture. It considers properties such as number of rooms, ammenities, house value and overall location proximity. RentThe6ix ensures users find a home that meets their desired lifestyle, budget, and eliminates the hassle of house hunting on the internet.

How we built it

We built RentThe6ix using a Next.js and a Typescript frontend. By using the Gemini API Key, we ensure a a deep understanding of the user's needs, and convert their descriptions into a personalized search engine, connecting the right homes to the right people.

We used Tiger Data to effectively store and manage rental listings on the internet. For our cloud infrastructure we used Vultr to effectively deploy our server and OpenTripPlanner to calculate the hypothetical commutes through different modes of transportation.

Challenges we ran into

Building RentThe6ix was a very challenging yet rewarding experience. One of the biggest challenges we faced was effectively web scraping to find appropriate data across many different sources. Listings on the internet, City of Toronto open data, TTC transit stops, and more all come in different formats, and connecting the inconsistent data was rigorous but also important.

Our team also spent a considerable amount of time breaking down how to make the user recommendations both meaningful and accurate. Suggessting the cheapest or the closest house is an easy yet brittle approach. We deeply thought of how to balance factures such as commute distance, price, safety, amenties and many more.

Additionally, our goal of this project was to minimize the technical complexity of our average user. We wanted our users to have a relatively straightforward experience without the need of having any prior technical experience or knowledge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our progress achieved in RentThe6ix. We effectively brought together AI, rental listings, and overall demographic details within our project. What makes us feel proud is that we are more than the average house listing system on the internet suggesting on simply only numeric constraints such as distance and price, and have a system to optimize for many more humane details.

What we learned

We learned a lot from our experience of building RentThe6ix. In building RentThe6ix, we as a group strengthened in our experience in full stack development, cloud infrastructure, git version control, geographical data and ultimately adapting to many different systems and development tools.

However, our biggest takeaway is not the technical side, it was fixing a real problem users face, and building our take as a solution towards it. House hunting has lots of factors including transportation, essential services that make an immediate impact on a person's life, and this project pushed our team into building a software that truly helps people, and makes an impact.

What's next for RentThe6ix

We currently see RentThe6ix as a starting point of our goal, and this hackathon is only the beginning of something special. We aim to scale RentThe6ix to reach a real audience, to have a real userbase, and eventually would like to extend just beyond Toronto and Ontario, and only bring things up from here.

Thanks :)