obaranek / subleteer

Sublet with ease

Subleteer: Case Study

Tech Stack: React, NodeJS, ExpressJS, MongoDB
Team members: Tahmeed Mostafiz, Omar Baranek, Dhruv Mittal
Demo: https://youtu.be/mSQwBNV6N94

Inspiration

Students are always stressing about finding housing. We've personally had very bad experience moving into our first apartments as it was incredibly difficult to find suitable apartments for a good price. Currently, students have to join different Facebook groups to look for sublets in different cities. Not only that, there is no way to filter through the group based on criteria or preferences. This lead us to make a platform that can make selling and getting sublets much easier

What it does

Subleteer is a platform to help students find their ideal sublet. Users can make listings including all the details you would expect from a regular housing listing and buyers can browse the posted listings to see what is available. Users can also filter and search by address to find sublets quickly. Once the ideal sublet is found, users can contact the buyer using their email id and negotiate the sublet agreements in writing.

How we built it

We built this project using the MERN stack, a popular group of technologies used to build web applications. The front end was built using ReactJS and utilized a mix of established libraries like MaterialUI and custom components using JSX and CSS. The backend was built using NodeJS and ExpressJS. The database we used was MongoDB as it is secure, scalable, and allowed geolocation querying very easily.

Challenges we ran into

There were numerous challenges we ran into when building this project. This was the biggest personal project we had worked on, with tasks being equally distributed amongst the three of us. As this was the first full stack web application we had built, we struggled to structure the web application properly at first. The number of different technologies needed caused some confusion, but we learnt how to get around those hurdles very fast.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're am proud to have finished this web application. We think it solves a real problem in Waterloo and other places so we hope that we can deploy the website and bring it to market. We are also really proud of tracking all the progress for this project. We worked effectively together and everyone contributed in different aspects of the web application.

What's next for Subleteer

The next steps would include bringing Subleteer to market. We would love to deploy and market this website as we think it could be incredibly helpful for students looking for housing.