Subleteer

Find your ideal sublet

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Inspiration

Students are always stressing about finding housing. I personally had a very bad experience moving into my first apartment as it was incredibly difficult to find suitable apartments for a good price. Currently, students have to join different Facebook groups to look for sublets in different cities. Not only that, there is no way to filter through the group based on criteria or preferences. This lead us to make a platform that can make selling and getting sublets much easier

What it does

Subleteer is a platform to help students find their ideal sublet. Users can make listings including all the details you would expect from a regular housing listing and buyers can browse the posted listings to see what is available. Users can also filter and search by address to find sublets quickly. Once the ideal sublet is found, users can contact the buyer using their email id and negotiate the sublet agreements in writing.

How I built it

I built this project using the MERN stack, a popular group of technologies used to build web applications. The front end was built using ReactJS and utilized a mix of established libraries like MaterialUI and custom components using JSX and CSS. The backend was built using NodeJS and ExpressJS. The database we used was MongoDB as it is secure, scalable, and allowed geolocation querying very easily.

Challenges I ran into

There were numerous challenges I ran into when building this project. This was the biggest personal project I had worked on, with tasks being equally distributed amongst me and 2 other friends. As this was the first full stack web application we had built, we struggled to structure the web application properly at first. The number of different technologies needed caused some confusion, but we learnt how to get around those hurdles very fast.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud to have finished this web application. I think it solves a real problem in Waterloo and other places so I hope we can deploy the website and bring it to market. I am also really proud of tracking all the progress for this project. I chose to act as the project manager, keeping track of all the changes and features that needed to be added and delegating tasks based on my teammate's interests and schedules. We worked effectively together and everyone contributed in different aspects of the web application.

What I learned

Besides learning the technical skills like React, MongoDB, Node etc, I also got the chance to apply all the learnings I got from my co-op to this project. I was able to apply techniques like using a centralized excel sheet to track different aspects of the project. I also learnt how to plan a web application from scratch, including planning the backend APIs and documenting my code so that my team mates are able to communicate between the front end and backend more effectively.

What's next for Subleteer

The next steps would include bringing Subleteer to market. I would love to deploy and market this website as I think it could be incredibly helpful for students looking for housing.

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