Rent2Be

Rent, Don't Rant! You’re Meant To Be With Your Perfect House!

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Inspiration

The process of renting is often tedious, repetitive, and exhausting for both renters and landlords. Why not make it efficient, fun, and enjoyable instead? For renters, no more desperately sifting through Marketplace, Craigslist, and shooting messages and applications into an abyss. For landlords, no more keeping track of prospective tenants' references and rent history through a series of back-and-forth messages.

What it does

Rent2Be is a mobile application that borrows from Tinder's iconic concept of swiping left and right, effectively streamlining the renting process for both renters and landlords. Find your perfect match, truly rent to be!

From the renter's perspective, we query their potential matches based on their preferences (e.g. budget, location, move-in date, lease length, beds/baths, amenities, commute preferences, etc.). In their feed, renters can then swipe right for listings they're interested in and left for listings that don't fit their criteria.

On the other end, landlords can create their listings for the current rental database. The landlord's feed will be populated with the profiles of renters interested in that particular listing - if the landlord also swipes right on the renter, it's a match!

Upon matching, the pair will have an open chat session for further discussion and access to additional tenant details such as reference contact information.

How we built it

  • The frontend is built with React Native and expo.
  • Our backend is powered by CockroachDB Serverless with "global locality" rows.
  • The UI/UX design is created with Figma.

Challenges we ran into

  • Dependency discrepancies across each of our commits would occasionally lead to merge conflicts.
  • Integrating CockroachDB for the first time.
  • Considering the privacy and security risks of an app that handles highly confidential information (e.g. occupation, salary, credit score, etc.).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • With CockroachDB we're setting a “global” locality for low-latency reads and high-latency writes. We saw this as a key benefit given there are significantly more read operations (repeated viewings of each profile/listing) than write operations (creation of these profiles/listings), there are typically more renters than landlords. We may sacrifice fewer users for greater users, though this provides an overall better user experience for all types of users (without excluding those that are regionally further, such as internationals that may be doing market research before immigration or moving abroad).
  • Using the benefits of serverless CockroachDB to automatically scale (and shard) for more popular geographic reasons. We would have to monitor and perform this manually otherwise.
  • Leveraging CockroachDB's details and integrations to enhance user experience and minimize engineer efforts where possible.
  • Creating a UI design that balances fun, energetic vibes with a professional, trustworthy feeling.

What we learned

  • Testing live on our mobile devices with expo and React Native
  • How to set up and use CockroachDB Serverless, creating clusters and importing data in the database
  • How to throw Water-LOO gxng signs (via will.i.am)

What's next for Rent2Be

There are so many features in the future of Rent2Be!

A big part of the renting process is the viewings - Rent2Be renters will be able to book an appointment as soon as there is a match. Landlords will fill in their calendar availability ahead of time and renters will be able to book directly in-app as soon as there's a match.

Community feedback is crucial and often a great source for making decisions - as such, Rent2Be will also have features for leaving reviews on both renters and landlords. Whether it's a review from previous tenants on the apartment listed by a landlord or a space for landlords to leave their tenants a reference letter once their lease ends, feedback from both ends will help to improve the overall user experience.

Rent2Be also has the potential to handle areas such as payment. Since this app already aims to mitigate the inefficiencies of the current rent processes, combining pay onto one platform will only make lives easier. This would also be an opportunity to work with payment or banking APIs as well as Security practices.

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