tenant side housing matching portal

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🏡 Inspiration

Everyone may rent a home at some point — but why must tenants scroll endlessly through listings, hoping to be noticed by landlords? I wanted to flip that experience. What if, instead of properties searching for tenants, tenants could safely broadcast their needs and let landlords match to them? That simple question sparked the idea for Reverse Zillow, a tenant-side housing matching portal.

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💡 What it does

Tenants chat with an AI assistant to describe their housing needs — budget, location, lifestyle, commute — in natural language. The system then generates a structured, anonymous tenant profile, stripping all personal data. Landlords and agents can search or semantically match these profiles to their listings and propose verified properties directly, without ever seeing tenant PII.

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🧱 How we built it

Built with Next.js 14 (App Router, TypeScript), Tailwind + shadcn/ui for UI, React Query for data fetching, and Zustand for state management. Backend logic uses Zod for schema validation and a custom PII protection layer (redactPII(), encryptSecret(), assertNoPII()). Security and AI layers are powered by AWS Bedrock (Claude + Guardrails), AWS Amplify for hosting, and Semgrep for static code scanning.

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⚙️ Challenges we ran into • Designing a data split between private (server-only) and public (searchable) tenant info. • Ensuring zero PII leakage during AI interactions. • Mocking semantic search securely while maintaining fast filter performance. • Integrating multiple AWS services within tight hackathon time limits.

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🏆 Accomplishments that we’re proud of • A fully working tenant-first housing portal built end-to-end in one sprint. • Security-by-design architecture: PII never leaves the backend. • Implemented AI Guardrails + Semgrep scan to meet “Secure AI Agent” sponsor challenge. • Deployed successfully on AWS Amplify with production-ready build.

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📚 What we learned • How to design privacy-preserving AI workflows that comply with real-world data-protection principles. • Integrating AWS Bedrock Guardrails for responsible AI output moderation. • Using Semgrep to automate code security reviews. • Balancing innovation and compliance when building AI for real-estate data.

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🚀 What’s next for Tenant-Side Housing Matching Portal • do it in real life and raise a pre seed round

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• aws-amplify
• aws-bedrock
• aws-cognito
• aws-kms
• claude
• cloudfront
• cloudwatch
• elegant-ui-components-?-react-query-(v5)-?-optimized-server-state-management-and-data-fetching-?-zustand-?-lightweight-client-side-state-management-?-zod-?-schema-validation-and-type-safe-api-contracts-?-vitest-?-testing-framework-for-schema
• json
• next.js-14
• node.js
• react-query
• s3
• search
• semgrep
• shadcn/ui
• tailwind-css
• typescript
• typescript)-?-full-stack-react-framework-for-modern-ssr-and-api-routes-?-tailwind-css-+-shadcn/ui-+-lucide-react-?-responsive
• vitest
• zod
• zustand