StingerSpaces

Listings detail page pt.1
Listings detail page pt.2
Landing and Listings Page
Review Page Pt. 1
Review Page Pt. 2
Apartment Search Page for Review
Sign In Page
Sign Up Page

Inspiration

Finding off-campus housing at Georgia Tech is harder than it should be, thanks to misleading ads and hidden fees scattered throughout apartment websites. We're freshman and already tired of it, so we built StingerSpaces. Our platform offers a comprehensive and transparent list of apartments and accommodations, helping you find a home that fits our users needs.

What makes us special? We feature an anonymous review system, allowing students to share authentic opinions on their apartment stays and the fees and rent they paid. With measures to prevent fake or malicious posts, users will get genuine insights they can actually use in hunting for apartments.

What It Does

StingerSpaces is a housing aggregator built specifically for the Georgia Tech community, designed to bring transparency to the off-campus housing search. The platform features an interactive map that visualizes apartment locations in relation to key campus landmarks like the CULC, CRC, and Tech Square. Users can efficiently filter and sort a comprehensive list of properties by price, user ratings, and name. Each listing provides essential details, authentic student-submitted reviews on everything from safety to management, and a direct link to the official property website for more information. To foster a trustworthy community, registered users can submit their own anonymous reviews, sharing crucial insights on real-world costs and living experiences.

How We Built It

Our development process centered on a decoupled architecture, with a Python backend and a JavaScript frontend. For the backend, we built an automated pipeline that periodically scrapes housing data, cleans it, and this curated dataset is then synchronized with our Supabase PostgreSQL database. The frontend was intentionally built without a heavy framework to maximize performance, utilizing Leaflet.js to create a fast, interactive map experience. All apartment data, user reviews, and ratings are fetched directly from Supabase in real-time, allowing us to build modular features for intelligent search, user authentication, and community reviews on a lightweight and responsive foundation. Our reviews system required some more attention. We had to make an accounts manager and authenticator to prevent spammy, sugarcoated reviews while making sure each review was anonymous, all in all creeating a wonderful, honest apartment hunting resource.

Challenges We Ran Into

Building StingerSpaces involved significant technical challenges. A primary hurdle was making a data pipeline. We had to automate the scraping of apartment data, process it, calculate geographic proximities, and ensure it synchronized reliably with our Supabase database to be displayed instantly on the frontend. Integrating third-party APIs also proved complex as we initially planned to incorporate Reddit discussions but faced difficulties with API access and the challenge of filtering unstructured, potentially biased comments to extract valuable insights. This led us to pivot and focus entirely on building our own authentic, verifiable review system from the ground up.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

A major accomplishment was creating a fully automated, end-to-end data system. Our Python backend not only scrapes and validates housing data but also plots each property on a map with campus landmarks to show proximity to campus, furrther tailoring it to students. Another achievement is us having made a sophisticated search feature using to ensure users can find properties even with colloquial names or typos (e.g., "SQ5" for "Square on 5th"). All this information from the entire backend pipeline feeds into another pretty big achievement, a sleek frontend built with vanilla JavaScript and Leaflet.js, providing a fast and highly interactive user experience.

What's Next for StingerSpaces

Our immediate next steps include making vast improvements to the UI/UX and adding more high-quality images for each respective accommodation listing. Long term, we plan to expand StingerSpaces to serve other universities, starting in Georgia with UGA, KSU, GSU, Emory, and others.