Landing Page
Signup
Manage housing preferences
Housemate suggestions
Scout for housing
Housemate Profile
Web landing page
Security features to flag housemates and landlords
Admin dashboard
Admin: Manage listings
Analytics
Rental history
Lease agreement management

Inspiration

The first step for most students arriving at CMU-Africa is to secure affordable accommodation within the first two weeks.
We interviewed about 15 students, and more than 90% expressed dissatisfaction with the house-hunting and roommate-finding process.

Some of the key issues identified included:

Limited housing options and listings
High prices, especially at semester start
Language barriers and communication breakdowns with landlords
Difficulty finding compatible roommates

We wanted to build something that makes this transition smoother, a smart roommate and housing matcher designed specifically for CMU-Africa students.

RoomEase was inspired by the idea of making settling in as seamless as possible, recognizing the importance of having a comfortable living space to students academically, emotionally, and financially.

What it does

Verified Housing & Matching: Locates trusted and affordable rental listings with transparent pricing, reviews, and verified landlords.
Personalized Housemate Matching: Uses an AI-driven algorithm to connect students with compatible roommates based on preferences like budget, lifestyle, and study habits.
RoomEase Property Management (RPM): Simplifies post-lease processes through centralized rent collection, maintenance tracking, and dispute resolution.
Multilingual & Centralized Interface: Bridges communication gaps with in-app translation and support for English, French, and Kinyarwanda.
Safety & Verification: Ensures a secure ecosystem through CMU-Africa email verification, landlord screening, and student feedback mechanisms.

⚙️ How We Built It

Our design for RoomEase includes two key components:

📱 Mobile App for Students: Users create profiles, specify preferences, and browse compatible housing or potential roommates.
🖥️ Admin Dashboard: Manages verified listings, landlords, and student data to ensure trust and transparency.

Our current prototypes were built using Google Stitch for initial layouts, finalized in Figma, and then developed into web-based prototypes using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

🔗 Live Links:

🧠 What We Learned

Through user interviews with over 15 CMU-Africa students, we discovered:

Students value trust and verification with landlords more than low prices over 70% reported trust or communication issues with landlords or brokers.
Students highlighted budget and cleanliness habits as the most important roommate compatibility factors.
A centralized, multilingual platform (English, Swahili, and Kinyarwanda) can effectively bridge communication gaps between students and local landlords.

⚠️ Challenges Anticipated

Maintaining Updated Listings:
Many landlords and brokers operate offline. Ensuring a continuously updated and verified housing database will require strong partnerships and possibly manual verification in the early stages.
Data Accuracy and Verification:
Preventing fraudulent or outdated listings, and verifying both users and property owners, may require a hybrid of automated checks and manual reviews.
Compatibility Matching Complexity:
Designing an algorithm that effectively matches students based on lifestyle preferences, routines, and habits involves subjective factors that can be difficult to quantify.
Scalability and Sustainability:
As the platform grows beyond CMU-Africa, maintaining performance, user trust, and operational scalability will become an ongoing challenge.

🌍 Future Vision

We envision RoomEase as a trusted housing ecosystem not only for CMU-Africa but also for other universities across Kigali enabling a smoother, safer, and smarter housing experience for students everywhere.