rethinkRE

smart investing for properties in the Charlotte area

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Problem Statement

The problem we are trying to solve is that when real estate investors try to look for properties, they have to go through multiple websites and manually look for properties based on certain requirements or criterias. We plan on making this a much more efficient process through our web application.

Our Solution & What it does

As mentioned above, the housing/real estate market today is currently very difficult to handle. Prices of properties are on the rise, and with the current socio-economic situation, job market, and other factors, North Carolina is becoming a hot spot for many people to move to. Along with the rise in real estate, investing in different areas such as stocks, crypto or the real estate market has become increasingly popular, but the current resources are not able to catch up with the rapid evolution of investing, and many young people don’t know the smartest way to invest. Our solution to this problem is our website rethinkRE, or rethink Real Estate. Our goal with this product is to help customers invest smartly in the real estate market. Our product helps the user find good properties in a given area, show their price points, locations, ratings, and trends of the given properties, and show the trends of the property market of a given city over a couple of years. rethinkRE provides this financial information in order to give the user a better understanding of what is available and what properties might be a good investment.

How we built it & What we learned

Below are the steps we took in our design process and what we learned throughout the steps:

  • We developed a project idea that fits into one of the 4 tracks that were provided.
  • We set up our GitHub repository and connected it to our IDEs (VS Code).
  • Then we came up with a name for our project (rethinkRE).
  • We designed our logo using Canva
  • We started to develop our website using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
  • We obtained datasets from the Zillow Website
  • We narrowed down the data to just Charlotte because that is where we live and we have seen some crazy trends in the area.
  • We ran into issues when we had to upload our data which was a CSV into the JavaScript file.
  • Switched to angular and node.js to better tackle the challenge of inputting from a csv file.
  • Then we decided to divide and conquer on a lower level. Valli decided to finish the search page which will consist of a map of different properties based on a given type of property and zip code, and a list of prices for the properties shown. Cherny decided to focus on developing the trends visual using Python, Anaconda, and Juypter Notebook.

Challenges

We initially faced a lot of challenges with figuring out what exactly we wanted to implement given our current situation as a society and modern problems we face today. As seniors, since we will enter the job market soon, and thus will have to step into the adult world, one of our concerns was with the housing market, which was the origin of our solution. Once we had a baseline idea, the next major challenge was implementing our solution. We struggled with understanding how to work with file inputs using CSV files, and after many hours of work we decided to change our technology to better utilize our files in order to extract our data. Luckily the shift from basic HTML/CSS/JS to angular HTML/CSS/TS wasn’t too much of a challenge, and we were able to produce a MVP that showcases the basic features of our solution.

Future of rethinkRE

Due to time constraints, we were unable to fully implement all the baseline features dynamically for this hackathon. We hope to get those features up and running, increase the scope of this project to more cities such as the RTP area, and provide more information to users about a given property from various datasets so that they can make more informed decisions. Other future features include providing a more extensive search bar with more categories to narrow a given search, including a search feature solely for housing, and personalizing the user experience by saving user data and preferences to a database. We also hope to make a mobile application of our website so that it is more readily available for users to reach.

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