HOUSEWISE

Know more. Risk less. Rent smarter – Helping students sign with confidence, not uncertainty.

Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

Every year, thousands of students sign contracts they don't fully understand, committing thousands of pounds to a landlord they've barely vetted, in just a few days. Finding student accommodation isn't just stressful, it's a system stacked against first-time renters. Hidden costs, scattered information, unverified landlords, and complex legal agreements leave most students flying blind at one of the biggest financial decisions of their university life.

• Cheap advertised rent often hides bills, fees, and deposits that make the true cost far higher than expected

• Tenancy agreements are full of legal jargon, hidden clauses, and terms like joint and several liability that most students have never encountered

• Students make decisions based on advertised rent alone with no easy way to compare true cost, safety, and fairness side by side

• Students don't know their rights, how to escalate repairs, or how to build evidence to challenge unfair deposit deductions

Idea Explanation

What is your idea? How does it fix the problem?

HouseWise is an AI-powered app that assists students and first-time renters before, during, and after their tenancy, bringing together contract analysis, landlord verification, cost comparisons, repair tracking, and deposit dispute support into one platform.

With our different features, HouseWise can help students at every stage of renting and tackle the real problems they face along the way. HouseWise supports students through every stage of renting by bringing everything they need into one place.

1) Before signing, it breaks down contracts into plain English, flags hidden clauses and unfair fees, detects pressure tactics, verifies landlord legitimacy, and calculates the true monthly cost of a property, all summarised into a Transparency Score so students can compare and choose with confidence.

2) During a tenancy, it logs maintenance issues, builds an evidence timeline, monitors repair deadlines, explains housing rights, drafts emails, and guides students through escalating problems to the right people.

3) At the end of a tenancy, it identifies unfair deposit deductions and helps students build a dispute response backed by evidence. Smart features including an AI Housing Assistant, Document Vault, and Housing Health Dashboard run across every stage, ensuring students always know where they stand and what to do next throughout the entire renting journey.

Implementation

How do all the pieces fit together? Does your frontend make requests to your backend? Where does your database fit in?

Firebase Tech Stack & Why We Chose It

1. Firebase Authentication

• What it handles: Sign-ups and logins via Google, Apple, or University emails.

• Why we chose it: This removes the risk of storing passwords ourselves. It securely creates the user's account and generates a unique User ID (UID) that connects everything else in the app to that specific student.

2. Cloud Firestore (Real-Time Database & Dashboard)

• What it handles: User profiles, property listing data, saved comparisons, active tenancy timelines, repair logs, chat histories, and anonymous reviews.

• Why we chose it: Cloud Firestore doesn't require the frontend to constantly reload to check for updates due to its real-time syncing capabilities.

• Due to its built-in live listeners, the student’s dashboard automatically updates tenancy status changes, repair deadline passes, or an emergency alarm is triggered.

3. Firebase Storage (Keeping Evidence)

• What it handles: Tenancy agreements, move-in photos, inventory files, screenshots of high-pressure texts, and final PDF dispute packs.

• Why we chose it: It securely holds media files in private cloud folders linked to the user's UID.

4. Firebase Cloud Functions (AI ChatBox)

• What it handles: Web scraping property links, running the Transparency Score algorithm, processing images through OCR text-scanners and communicating with LLM APIs (Claude API)

• Why we chose it: It allows the app to be event driven as it removes the need for a server as these bits of code are only used when a user writes data to the Firestore or uploads images.

5. Google Cloud Tasks & Cloud Messaging

• What it handles: Tracking repair deadlines and displaying urgent tenancy status alerts to the student's dashboard.

• Why we chose it: To perform automatic daily checks against legal timelines and push notifications to the student when action needs to be taken.

Overall, we feel using the Firebase setup provided us with the best implementation as it meant we didn’t need to build our own server as mentioned earlier. Furthermore, making use of event-driven architecture and using Cloud  Firestore’s live syncing rather than HTTPs requests ensures that AI chatbot responses, transparency scores, and repair alerts instantly update on the student's screen for a seamless experience students can trust.

Challenges

What did you struggle with? How did you overcome it?

We are working on a problem that resonates with many students including our team, hence, we found a lot of data around students' experience with accommodation. The challenge was in summarising the essential data in one slide. We chose the data that showed the biggest challenges students face and how these affect their lives and university experience.

We also had issues with implementing the API. We haven't managed to deploy it however we created our base code and wireframes on Figma to show how the product would look.

Accomplishments

What did you learn? What did you accomplish?

We found a couple of apps and websites like RentCheck, Rate Your Landlord, goHeather that helps students check an area in the UK for levels of crime and rent levels or review and compare contracts. Each app focuses only on one part of the issue however, our app is specifically made to support students throughout the daunting rental journey, from property search to deposit return. The app combines pricing, safety, landlord transparency, legal guidance and AI in a single app.

Completing this challenge in less than 2 days hasn't been easy but through our team-work, clear communication and excellent time-management skills, we have managed to research and design a solution for a real-world problem.

Next Steps

What are the next steps for your project? How can you improve it?

We would research how to deploy the API and integrate other databases.

We would build a fully functioning app and then pilot with student unions and societies so that we can collect user data and recommendations to refine the features.