Listings

Find your match, make your home.

Comment

Inspiration

Finding a home is a stressful experience for anyone. Today's market provides several housing search platforms that offer overstimulating and frustrating UI when trying to find a home that matches our needs. Our team designed a solution that offers a simple, empowering experience that prioritizes mindful design & features important for communities of marginalized identities.

Problem & Opportunity Space

WE DON'T WANT TO SEE A TINY MAP WITH A MILLION DOTS ON A TINY SCREEN. For most people, the tedious process of zooming in on a map to click on a tiny little dot on an already small screen is overwhelming enough to end the search for a home before it has already begun. This provides an opportunity space for a visually more appealing application that simplifies the home filtering and viewing process to elevate the home shopping experience.

WHEREVER YOU GO, YOUR PHONE GOES WITH YOU. According to Ani Petrosyan on Statista.com, only 62.2% of global users accessed the internet on their laptop or desktop during the first quarter of 2024 while 93.7% accessed it via smartphones. This data, along with increased cell phone use by younger generations, suggests that creating a more mobile friendly platform would increase overall population accessibility and supports continued consumer use while on the go.

HELLO, CLIMATE CHANGE. Climate change is impacting our lives more and more everyday. Including information about climate risk including the quality of soil and water and risk of flood, wildfire, heat are important for individuals to make decisions about where to make a home. Information such as compatibility for energy efficient additions are also significant not only for reducing cost but also for future improvements.

CAN I EVEN LIVE HERE. Inclusive and accessible design means thinking about whether a home has a walkway or ramp, handrails, wide front doors, and installed grab bars in bathrooms. Is the community safe for me and my friends when I host a dinner-party? Our app includes search preferences that filters homes with these needs.

What it Does

The Listing App offers a simplified, yet engaging platform to view and save prospective living spaces. Users are able to set their preferences to preemptively filter homes that may or may not align with their search. After completing the initial set up, the application displays the profile of one house at a time providing the user with the option to "heart" the house by swiping right, or "X" the house by swiping left. Once a swipe left has been made, that particular house will not show up again on the users feed.

Users of the app are able to view their "hearted" homes to determine which ones they would like to send to their real estate agent. A send button on each of the living space profiles allows the user to directly message their agent on the app with the link to that space.

Creating an in depth and user friendly experience was important to our team. We wanted the app to be appealing and fun while exuding a sense of calm for those who find home searching stressful. We also wanted to ensure that the home setting page included accessibility filters and community preferences. Our settings page incorporates options such as proximity to schools, restaurants, and queer friendly communities.

How We Built It

We built this project with Canva, React Native with Expo, Firebase, and Expo Notifications.

Challenges We Ran Into

*1. Set Up * We had a lot of problems setting up React Native (Expo) and that consumed a lot of our time and energies on the first day to get the team set up.

*2. Messaging Service * It was quite complicated to make a messaging service for the users to be able to communicate easily with realtors about properties they're interested in, but we were able to make a nice design with essential functionality (including notifications).

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We are so proud of everything we achieved in such a short amount of time for Technica, despite the challenges we faced.

What We Learned

We learned that maybe next time we should practice setting up a repo in React Native on different device types (Mac, Windows) so that we don't have to spend a lot of time trying to debug issues with the setup.

What's Next for Listings

Next, we would like to create the real estate agents side of the application so that all communication and viewing of house listings chosen by the client/user are completed within the platform.

We would also like to incorporate an API to pull actual real estate data, but we could not afford the real estate APIs for this hackathon.

*Please Note * As this is a mobile app, you cannot "try it out" in the same way. We have created demos from our own devices using Expo Go, but please come and chat with us in person if you want to see how it works!

You can find the Github for this project here

Share this project:

Updates