KeySteps

Inspiration

Not everyone on our team comes natively from Munich. Moving here not only faced us with the common housing shortages of Munich but also with figuring out where it is possible to live in Munich to reach the university fast while having all the amenities of the city we need. As not only we but also Anna & Toby from the problem statements seem to struggle with finding suitable locations to even look for real estate, we wanted to solve this location problem. In most real estate portals, you already need to enter a district you want to live in (e.g. Schwabing-Freimann), but finding suitable city parts that are affordable and still fulfil your own needs can take time and effort. We wanted to change that.

We wanted to start at 0 where others start at 1, not only for the location but also for the general prior knowledge necessary to understand the process. Therefore, we wanted to take the future real estate buyer by the hand throughout the entire process. This is how we got to KeySteps, giving you the key steps to your own keys. From calculating the budget for buying a house or apartment to finding areas in a city that meet your own requirements and are within your budget to explanations, guidelines and links on how to proceed after finding a good house, getting a loan, and in the end, closing the deal. We tried to guide an uninformed beginner through the entire process.

What it does

KeySteps is a web application that accompanies a future real estate owner through the key steps to buy his new home. It helps calculate the initial budget, priorize your needs and find areas in your target city that fulfill your needs. It visualizes them on a map to aid in the real estate search process and helps guide the user through explanations, guidelines, and links about the documents needed for a loan, what steps to take, and how to approach the entire buying process.

How we built it

We built our project as a website with JavaScript and Next.js. We tried to use the given APIs as much as possible. This included the API for ThinkImmo, the Intherhyp API and even the Google Cloud tokens we got from the Google Booth. ThinkImmo provides the data for region prices and real estate listings and the distances of the listings to public amenities like schools, kindergartens, supermarkets, or similar. The Interhyp API was used for the budget calculations, and the Interhyp website generally provided ample sources of information to link to on our website. The Google Cloud tokens were mainly used to run the Google Maps instance, which powers the interactive map that visualizes regions that are interesting to the user.

Challenges we ran into

As 3 out of our 4 team members had absolutely no prior experience with web development, taking on a web development project and developing a website was a challenge in and of itself. From learning JavaScript on the fly over the course of a weekend to working with APIs for the first time, the entire project was a challenge in itself. But it's a super fun one.

What we learned

As web development is not part of the Computer Science study program, it was for most of us a first experience that not only taught us interesting web dev skills that we picked up this weekend but also taught us generally that web development is a super exciting and interesting field that we want to learn more about in the future.

What's next for KeySteps

As KeySteps takes the user by the hand and tries to guide it through the entire buying process of real estate, there are naturally a lot of synergies that can be used. At the end of the process, many potential buyers will search for a bank and a notary's office, which can create great synergy with Interhyp or notary's offices. These could be established and broadened through file uploads to KeySteps that help bundle all of the buyer's, seller's and house's data for an upcoming transaction to streamline processes, for example, for the Interhyp or a Bank.

Another next step is to improve the general understandability of the project. We tried to make it as understandable as possible for someone without background knowledge, but there might still be some hiccups that inexperienced users could face. Improving explanations and general understandability is something KeySteps would greatly benefit from.