Rate My Housing

Inspiration

Are you still trying to find a place to live while studying at the University of Waterloo? Are you an international student who has never visited campus, but looking for housing? Do you find it difficult to compare different residences and housing options in order to choose the best one? Well worry no more because our app will allow you to find a home with ease.

These were issues that we faced while coming to university as first-years. This is why we decided to create a web app that enables users to easily find the most popular housing available and compare them all in one platform.

What it does

Rate My Housing is a web app that provides Waterloo students with all the crucial information they need to find the right housing for them. Conveniently view housing details such as utilities, amenities, and proximity from campus. Most importantly, Rate My Housing allows you to view Google ratings at your fingertips and add new ratings instantly!

How we built it

We built Rate My Housing using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, leveraging tools like Bootstrap and API-integration. The app is hosted on Glitch.

Challenges we ran into

We faced challenges with the backend including implementing the .js file into the webapp in order to make the submit ratings feature. Initially, we wanted to implement PHP and use a database to store information that users post on the website, however, given the time restraint we could not finish implementing this feature fully. Another challenge we faced was showing all details of the google reviews, such as name, date, rating and descriptions. Along with acquiring a google API for Google Places and Google Maps JavaScript, some reviews leave out details like name, date, or description. Because of this, we had to implement placeholder values to make it look more professional.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a functional web app and learning lots within a very short amount of time. Considering some of us had very minimal experience with web development, we found it incredible how much everyone contributed to the project to the degree of professionalism presented. We came up with the idea without knowing how to build it, and in the end, we were able to complete most of the features and design that we wanted in our site.

What we learned

We learned how to use Glitch, which allows all of our team members to collaborate together and work on code at the same time. We learned more about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, implementing bootstrap, as well as troubleshooting and problem solving.

What's next for Rate My Housing

Fully implementing the features that we did not have time to add. In addition, we would like to add a greater image gallery, feature YouTube videos, and allow users to access a wider range of resources regarding Waterloo housing through the web app. We would also like to add a refined search feature.