About
Let what you care about, find your next home for you!
"SherHome" is a web application we created where users can narrow down available listings for houses and apartments according to their interests cross referenced with the open data we have about the city.
Your personal needs and interests can be understood in the data, for example if you:
- don't have a car, you're going to need an apartment that's on the bus line that you use to get to work.
- have children, you'll want what's close to both a park, and a school.
- love going out, then you'll want to live somewhere near to where all the events in Sherbrooke tend to take place.
- don't like going out, you'll want to be much further away from those events.
The application will return the top ranking real estate listings for what your priorities are and reports how closely the listing meets your priorities with a small status bar on the right. Once you have found a listing you like, you can click on it to open the original Kijiji posting.
All of this serves to streamline the entire process for finding a new home.
Try the application here!
Data Sets Used
For this application, we included data from the following data sets from the Ville de Sherbrooke website:
- Quoi Faire?
- Où manger?
- ZAP: Points d'accès
- Transport en commun
- Bâtiments
- Aires aménagées
- Écocentres - liste et horaires
- Camps de jour
- Murs dédiés aux graffitis temporaires et permanents
Additionally, we scraped Kijiji for the listing of houses and apartments, and used Flaticon for the icons in the application.
Inspiration
The inspiration came from one of our team members who recently had to look for an apartment in town. They didn't own a car, so they needed a place next to a useful bus stop. They had a hard time know where the bus stops were, and whether they were close to available places to rent.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges for our team was the inconsistent formatting of the open data, which required a lot of extra work for our back-end team, despite how many of the data sets would have been relevant for this application. A result of this, and the limited time available, is that we had to create code that was very 'ad hoc', dealing with each data set individually.
Occasionally we also didn't fully realize what resources we had available for making our work easier till it was too late. For example, some of the open data we have addresses of relevant points of interest instead of longitude/latitude point that we were using in our application. We didn't find an implementation that would convert addresses into longitude and latitude points, until much later in the day when it was not worth the time to implement.
Accomplishments
The communication between team members went well, even when the time limit started to put us all under pressure, because we all enjoyed the idea of the project and believed in its usefulness for people today.
The Theme of 'Augmented Reality'
This application fits into the theme of the HackSherbrooke 2016, since it gives the user a more complete virtual experience of the city of Sherbrooke when they are looking for a new flat. They can see and learn more of what is available in the city when they are 'moving' through it online.
What We Learned
Aiming for a strong, basic, and simple initial version of the application is important. Not getting overwhelmed with extra features is important for the survival of the project. Rather polish the base, so that it really works well and elegantly, than add on secondary features.
What's Next?
We could do many things to expand the usefulness of the application. For example:
- have the events and data apps update dynamically.
- use other websites to increase the number of apartment listings.
- create pre-defined 'profiles' for users to choose from to make searching quicker.
- translate the interface into French, and other languages.
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