Room For One

Inspiration

It was extremely difficult and frustrating to find housing during first-year and future years when roommates leave. Facebook Marketplace is not a great platform for this high demand, so we decided to build a dedicated platform for Queen's students for all their housing needs.

What it does

As a user, you can be a seeker or a poster. A poster posts listings, whether that's a landlord posting their properties, or a student looking for more roommates. A seeker sees listings, and they are able to click inside to learn more, they are also able to contact the poster to get in touch. Furthermore, for seekers, the app web scrapes popular listing sites and gathers them together (also linking it to the original post). This way, students won't have to go through dozens of listing websites to find their houses.

How we built it

The web scraping is done with Beautiful Soup in Python, the data is then served through an HTTP sever with Django. The app itself is written with NextJS.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a ton of problems along the way. Virtually every functionality was a struggle, getting web scraping to work properly was extremely challenging, serving it up to a server took a long time, handling authentication through Auth0, and building the UI with React. Even collaborating with Git and GitHub. All of these are extremely challenging and time-consuming, therefore, not all our features we had in mind were implemented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the web scraping functionality and the app's ability to display it in a user-friendly UI.

What we learned

What's next for Room For One

• More external sites for web scraping
• Finish up authentication
• Implement routes for seeing more info for native listings
• Improve styling etc.

Built With

• auth0
• beautiful-soup
• django
• nextjs
• python