Rental Shield

Login Authentication
Landing Page
Feed/Roommate Finder
Landloard Finder, Fair Rent Estimator

Inspiration

We were inspired by RateMyProfessor, a platform that gives students transparency before making an important decision.

What it does

Rental Shield allows renters to:

Analyze whether a unit is fairly priced using HUD fair market rent data, Census data, and local competition.
Identity property ownership using public city data.
Flag potential overpricing and see estimated annual overpayment. -Access a Tenant Board for community Q&A and roommate matching ## How we built it We built Rental Shield using:
Python (FastAPI) for backend logic and API routes
Supabase for authentication and database storage.
Public open datasets for information on pricing by zip code, etc.
Modular service architecture to handle fair rent calculations, ownership lookip, and data aggregation.
A lightweight frontend handling backend data with JavaScript and rendering with HTML and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Cleaning and normalizing public housing datasets was a tricky situation at first, as well as matching zip-code rent data to individual units. Wiring everything together inside of SupaBase was also quite tricky, especially meticulously covering API keys and authentication tokens.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are quite proud of the authentication and security provided with our site. It supports full anonymous posting, as well as a secure authentication. Wiring Gemini was also tricky, and we are proud that we got that integrated.

What we learned

We learned that housing data transparency is fragmented but quite powerful when unified. We also realized that public datasets require a significant amount of cleaning before its usable.

What's next for Rental Shield

We plan to expand past Providence and go to statewide coverage. Implementing a fully operation tenant rights AI assistant with verified citations is also on the board as well. Lastly, we plan to launch a mobile-first version for student renters as well, allowing for this to shift into a much larger platform.