Inspiration
Many apartment owners have available properties but choose not to rent them out due to laziness, inconvenience, or other personal reasons. Meanwhile, countless students struggle to find affordable housing near their universities, which sometimes even delays their academic start dates. Recognizing those problems, we were inspired to create a solution that bridges landlords with vacant apartments and students desperately seeking a place to live.
What it does
Strent is a platform designed to match landlords and students efficiently. It ensures that rental prices remain relatively affordable for students, while requiring verification to confirm that users seeking housing are indeed enrolled students. Strent simplifies the process for landlords to list their properties and for students to find suitable accommodations quickly and securely.
How we built it
We built Strent using MongoDB as our primary database to store user and property information. Landlords input their apartment details into the platform, while students create profiles to filter and search for available listings based on their needs. MongoDB holds login credentials, user profiles, apartment listings, and search filters. Plus, we integrated the Google Maps API to enhance the user experience by displaying available housing options visually on a map. This allows students to easily see which apartments are closest to their university campuses. Our stack involves both frontend and backend development, and we worked together to create a seamless experience for both types of users — landlords and students.
Challenges we ran into
When we first started, getting MongoDB up and running definitely wasn’t easy. From just connecting to the database to figuring out how to organize everything properly for different users and apartment listings — it felt like there was a new thing to learn at every step. Another big challenge was getting Gemini AI to work the way we wanted. Integrating AI into our backend sounded simple at first, but making sure everything actually ran smoothly took a lot of trial, error, and late-night debugging sessions.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of our biggest achievements was successfully automating the process of inserting user-submitted data into MongoDB. Seeing the data flow smoothly from our forms into the database was a huge milestone. Another accomplishment is the amount we learned about full-stack web development. Both team members contributed to both frontend and backend tasks, resulting in a well-rounded learning experience and a stronger understanding of how a complete web application is structured.
What we learned
How to store data in the database. Creating UI and UX API calls How to create a Full-Stack Web from Scratch Maybe to have a branch where each team member can work on...
What's next for Strent
We're really excited about where Strent can go from here. Our first goal is to keep making the platform better — polishing the design, adding new features, and making the experience as smooth and easy as possible for both students and landlords. We're also planning to put a lot of energy into getting the word out. The more landlords who list their apartments and the more students who find homes through Strent, the stronger and more helpful the community becomes. We truly believe Strent has the potential to grow way beyond just one university. One day, we hope students across the country — and even around the world — will be able to find a place to call home through our platform. And we're just getting started.
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