Re-Lease | Devpost

Inspiration

In Canada, specifically in Montreal, when a person rents an apartment, they have to sign a lease, which is sort of a contract. This contract can be for a year, two years, or more. Often, people might want to move from their apartment, but their lease agreement might not end soon. In Montreal, landlords are notorious for imposing high penalties for lease terminations. Now with Bill 31, landlords have the right to also deny a tenant's lease transfer request without reason. Many landlords believe that the high penalties for premature lease termination serve as a form of protection for both parties to the agreement. When a tenant breaks a lease early, the landlord loses potential rent income from the vacant property until it is rented again. To avoid this problem, the tenant finds a new tenant to transfer their lease rights to them. This explains why lease transfers are so common in Montreal.

Currently, Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace facilitate apartment hunting. However, they aren't dedicated platforms for renters.

What it does

Our application is intended to help Montrealers transfer their leases during the current housing crisis. The application would allow tenants to advertise their apartments (location, size, pets allowed, etc.). They could also post their current lease agreement clauses, the period in which they would like to find another lease, and what they are looking for during the transfer process.

How we built it

We used HTML, JavaScript, CSS the library Dash in Python, and MongoDB to create our website. Google Cloud Storage was used to host images. Since some of us are not proficient in Python, HTML, JS, or CSS yet, we used OpenAI to guide us on what to start with and in which direction we should go. Also, we tracked our code using Git and GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

For most of the teammates, it was our first time using the Dash library to make our website. It was challenging to get the desired layout, as well as use the new ecosystem. We were all working on different pages, so it took some time to create them and subsequently connect them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy that we successfully built a functioning website that could potentially benefit Montrealers in this current housing crisis.

What we learned

We learned how to use Python (Dash library), HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build a website. We learned how to work together efficiently and solve encountered problems on our own.