SuitedLiving — Find a home that fits your life.
Inspiration
Imagine finding the perfect apartment. It's affordable, close to work, and has everything you need. But when you arrive for a viewing, you discover three steps at the entrance. You use a wheelchair, and suddenly, that apartment is no longer an option.
For millions of people with disabilities, finding housing means answering questions that traditional rental platforms rarely address. Can I enter the building? Navigate the bathroom? Get to the grocery store nearby? These aren't minor preferences; they determine whether someone can live independently.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, 10.2 million adult renters in the US need accessibility features or live with someone who does. Yet accessibility information remains remarkably difficult to find.
We wondered: How do we know so much about a property's square footage and amenities, yet so little about whether someone can actually live there?
That's why we built SuitedLiving.
What it does
SuitedLiving is a personalized housing discovery platform that helps people with disabilities find homes suited to their individual accessibility needs.
Instead of relying on a generic "accessible" checkbox, users can describe what matters to them, whether that's a step-free entrance, wheelchair-friendly bathrooms, or access to nearby amenities.
SuitedLiving brings together property listings, detailed interior scans, and aerial imagery to help users investigate potential accessibility barriers both inside the home and in the surrounding neighborhood. An interactive floor-plan visualization helps users explore accessibility room by room, highlighting potential obstacles and areas requiring further verification.
Because finding a home isn't just about the apartment. It's about being able to live your life there.
How we built it
We built SuitedLiving using Vite for the frontend and Flask for the backend, deploying the application through Vercel.
At the heart of our project is the integration of three complementary data sources:
- CoStar: Property and rental listing data, providing the foundation for discovering and comparing homes.
- Matterport: Detailed interior 3D scans, helping us examine layouts and potential accessibility barriers within a property.
- Vexcel: High-resolution aerial imagery, providing insight into building exteriors and surrounding environments.
By combining these sources, we created a more comprehensive view of accessibility than conventional rental listings can provide.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was parsing CoStar's extensive datasets and determining whether they contained the information we actually needed. Property details were distributed across multiple files and complex nested structures, making it difficult to connect listings with their corresponding buildings and apartment models.
We also discovered that even incredibly detailed real estate datasets often lack basic accessibility information. We had to determine which features could be identified through property records, which required Matterport or Vexcel imagery, and which couldn't be reliably verified.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of integrating three different sources of property and spatial data into a housing discovery experience centered on individual accessibility needs. Our interactive floor-plan visualization is particularly exciting because it transforms interior spatial information into something renters can use to understand potential barriers.
We're also proud of extending accessibility analysis beyond the apartment itself, recognizing that independence depends on the surrounding environment as much as the home.
What we learned
We learned that having more data doesn't necessarily mean having the right data. Even comprehensive property datasets can overlook information essential to people's everyday lives.
We also learned that accessibility is deeply personal, and that communicating uncertainty is just as important as identifying potential barriers.
What's next for SuitedLiving
We hope to expand our accessibility assessments with more verified measurements, improve neighborhood analysis through pedestrian routing and sidewalk data, and allow property managers to contribute verified accessibility information.
Everyone deserves a place to call home. Finding one shouldn't mean overcoming another set of barriers just to get the information you need.
Try SuitedLiving: https://suited-living.vercel.app/#/
