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 posts by neighborhood, unit type and price
Read reviews from students who actually lived there
See the rent people really paid, not just the advertised price
Find out which landlords students recommend
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 place is okay.
Current tenants - They finally get a place to warn people about a bad landlord or recommend a good one.
The Data
The data is housing posts written by students, which is the whole point of the site. There are two kinds of post:
Reviews. A student rates a place they lived in and says what it was really like.
Sublets. A student lists a room they need to fill.
Every post has the same information:
Address and landlord name
Neighborhood and unit type, picked from a list
Monthly rent
A rating and a comment
The date it was posted
We set up the short lists ourselves (neighborhoods, unit types and post types). Everything else comes from students.
Since every post connects to a neighborhood and a unit type, 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 post goes up in a neighborhood you follow.
Data visualizations - Charts of rent by neighborhood and rent over time.
Database Schema
The database has five tables.
posts is the main table and holds every review and sublet that students add
users holds student accounts
neighborhoods, unitTypes and postTypes are lookup tables
Each post links to a user, a neighborhood, a unit type and a post type
