Home Buying Preparation

Inspiration

We were inspired by the accessibility we see in mobile apps for average users. For apps such as mobile banking, its as simple as opening an app on your phone and you can manage your finances. We wanted to bring this accessibility to the home buying experience. This coincided well with Fannie Mae's challenge, so we decided to take it on and build our app around that idea.

What it does

It allows a user to input loan information, income, down payments, and other information relevant to getting a mortgage, and it will recommend ways in which they can improve their financial state and ability to buy a home.

How we built it

We started by planning out the layout and design in Figma, and planned out how we would share and collaborate on the App.

We built it with React native for android devices. We used android studio in order to run an Android Virtual Machine on our laptops. We split the work up between our 4 team members in order to focus in on all of the different aspects of the App. We then shared our work through GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a number of challenges while making the App. The most major one was trying to implement .CSV reading support into the application. We had a team member who spent an upwards of 8 hours researching and trying different solutions to this problem, however we ended up coming to the conclusion that react native cannot read files the way we had wished it to and we were unfortunately forced to scrap that part of the App.

Our second major issue came with the Android Virtual Machines. We had an issue where they would stop working and it would take up to an hour to repair them each time. This unfortunately slowed our development quite a lot, however we were still able to push through and finish our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of our ability to learn new things. I'm also proud of how we managed to take user input and accurately calculate all of the necessary data points for a mortgage.

I'm proud that our application can run on multiple android devices, including the virtual machines, and our own personal phones.

What we learned

We learned android development, as none of us had done it before. Two of our group members had also never programmed in JavaScript, much less used React, so they were able to pick it up and create something.

It was all of our first hackathons, so we learned a lot about planning something that is reasonable for you to make. We also learned that sometimes things in development just constantly don't go your way, but if you are able to push through that, you can still create something great.

What's next for your app?

The future would be to work to make the UI more intuitive and better looking in order to improve the users experience. It would also be to integrate it into a banking or financial management app in order to allow easier access to these resources, and the financial information that leads to the decisions.