AggieAcres

Simplifying the Davis apartment search with one web form.

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Inspiration

Many UCD students wish to move out of dorms after their first year but struggle with the current housing search tools. Traditional methods require checking multiple websites and making complex comparisons based on different criteria.

What it does

Our search web form, AggieAcres, addresses this by providing a streamlined, user-friendly platform where students can specify their needs and instantly receive tailored housing options in Davis, California. The user just has to input their preferred number of bedrooms and monthly rent pricing. Some tailored apartment listings are then provided to the user based on those preferences.

How we built it

Backend: We used Python server scripts to fetch and process data from different APIs. Frontend: We used a program ("Screenshot-to-Code") that uses large multimodal models like GPT-4 to autogenerate templates of our HTML webpages, then designed them with Tailwind CSS.

Challenges we ran into

  • Fetching and integrating housing data from multiple different websites was a problem since we were newbies learning about web scraping on the fly.
  • We had an issue getting the screenshot-to-code model to boot up in our terminals (both on Windows and Ubuntu) since it requires a lengthy process of executing commands.
  • Editing HTML elements to realize our design goals for the webpages was difficult given our minimal knowledge base.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The two of us who worked on the backend side successfully web scrapped hundreds of apartment listings along with their pricing & bedrooms info
  • Being able to use the GPT-4 vision models through Ubuntu to scan screenshots of example websites and generate a new template.
  • A unique, cute logo for AggieAcres :)

What we learned

For those of us on the frontend side, we learned a decent amount about editing webpages with HTML code and Tailwind CSS! The backend crew learned plenty about Python web-scrapping, aggregating web data, and converting them into .csv data.

What's next for AggieAcres

Plenty. We want our web form to take in housing data from many reliable websites (e.g. Zillow, Rent.com, etc., etc.) and turn our webpages into a beautiful, UC Davis-themed website. We also want to include more user preferences such as commuting distance.

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