Real housing reviews by USC students for USC students
Site project proposal by Saniya Patel, Acad 276
Pitch Video
Summary
Finding housing off campus at USC is stressful. Most of us sign a lease for a place we know almost nothing about, and listing sites only show what the landlord wants us to see.
TrojanNest is a site where students tell each other what a place is really like. On the site you can:
Search buildings near campus by price, distance and rating
Read reviews from students who actually lived there
See the rent people really paid, not just the advertised price
Find out if past tenants got their deposit back
Post or find a sublet for summer or a semester abroad
Other students already know all of this. Right now it just lives in group chats and disappears when they graduate.
Audience
Sophomores and juniors. They are moving out of USC housing and renting on their own for the first time.
Transfer, grad and international students. They often have to pick a place before they get to LA and can't tour it in person.
Parents. They usually sign the lease too and want to know the building is okay.
Current tenants. They finally get a place to warn people about a bad landlord or recommend a good one.
The Data
The site starts with a list of buildings near campus that we put in ourselves. Each one has:
Address and neighborhood
Landlord name
Walking time to campus
Everything after that comes from students, which is the whole point of the site.
Reviews. A rating, the unit type, the rent they paid, whether the deposit came back, and a comment.
Sublets. The building, the dates, the asking rent and a short description.
Since every review connects to a building and a neighborhood, we can show things like average rent by neighborhood or which landlords have the best ratings.
It also fits what we are covering later in the semester:
Logins. Only students with an account can post, and admins can remove fake reviews.
Emails. Get an alert when a new review or sublet goes up for a building you saved.
Data visualizations. Charts of rent by neighborhood and rent over time.
Database Schema
The database has six tables.
neighborhoods and unitTypes are lookup tables
buildings holds the starting list of places near campus
users holds student accounts
reviews and sublets hold what students add, and each row links to a user, a building and a unit type
