RentersFeedback is a brainchild from a tweet that a friend tweeted back in August:
Based on this tweet, I thought it would be nice if renters have some say about landlords. Around the same time, my girlfriend was looking for an apartment/house to rent. Even though we found a place, we were not sure if it’s a good place. And there were no reviews about this place. On the first impression, the house didn’t look like a place where anybody has lived in a long time, but we made our decision and went ahead with it. It would have been nice if there was a review of this place.
I am sure when most people are looking for places to rent, they use services like Padmapper or Zillow which offers the easiest way to find places based on area, requirements, budget, other facilities. But none of these applications offer a review system.
What this will solve?
Renters Feedback will solve the much-needed place to provide reviews about the places that people are renting. This will help future renters to look for good places to rent. This will also make landlords and rental management companies more accountable. I hope Renters Feedback can help renters with reviews for the places they want to rent.
What about Yelp?
Yelp.com has been providing reviews of restaurants, small businesses, and other things, but rarely of a standalone house to be rented or a rental management company. Yelp has done a tremendous job, but it lacks in this one area.
Why an application with a single functionality?
Less is more. Simple functionality matters in long terms than a complicated one. In marketing, there is a term affordance that refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine how the thing could be used. A single functionality of the application will help users to navigate and use the application efficiently.
Techstack
To build RentersFeedback.com, I have used Spring Boot Microservice based architecture. I have implemented the current user interface using Twitter Bootstrap, CSS, Javascript, Google Javascript API, and Thymeleaf. Backend is written using Java and database supported.
Using Redis for caching, Google for OAuth2 authentication along with regular authentication.
Heroku.com is my choice of the cloud platform to launch the application. It offers an easy way to assemble all the needed services like database, Redis, and the server itself.
One future change for this might be to move the user interface to reactjs. Something that is currently I am working on.
Feedback
I would love it if you could use the application and would appreciate any feedback. Subscribe to my blog to find out more about renters’ feedback.