In our project, we aim to solve the pain points that Interhyp had in these years. As bank interest rates rise, an increasing number of people cannot afford to buy houses. As a result, numerous people go to banks for loans. The problem, however, would be how to find the mortgage offer that best suits their needs.
Apart from the basic challenge Interhyp provides, we have two other specific use cases at hand:
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Molly came to Munich for work a few years ago and lived alone in a rented apartment. She always feels very lonely, not only because she doesn't have family and friends by her side, but also a sense of insecurity because she doesn't own her own house. To raise her sense of security and well-being, she decides to buy her own house after saving an amount of money. So how could we help Molly to find her dream home and even help with the house design?
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Molly has now found her dream house and wants to take out a loan from the bank. Unfortunately, she has no financial background and no idea about interest rates, not to mention maximizing her interests.
We wanted to tackle these problems by creating a one-line service where we help people find their dream shells and make their dreams come true. In addition to the loan plans, we also take into account the challenge of finding houses for users, because we want our users to find not just a place to settle, but a home that can truly warm their hearts, just like a snail shell is to a snail.
What it does
Our product provides a one-stop service to help users find their dream homes and then provide them with beneficial mortgage offers to choose from. What's more, we are also here for home design. Shortly speaking, our service is done in 3 steps.
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Dream Shell Finding: The main idea is to get the user's input about their dream home including location, size, room numbers, type, purchase price, etc. Also very important is the user's savings. Based on the information entered, we provide users with a list of houses with basic information and the total price. Add-on features would be tags such as "city center", "near subway", "garden", etc.
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Bank Mortgage offers: After finding the dream house, our website would offer users reasonable and suitable loan offers from different banks, taking into account the users' savings, the housing price, as well as the fixed payment period. Users can also easily change the set period by sliding the range bar. The interface is designed to be very straightforward and user-friendly, and it also does not require any prior knowledge about loans or interest rates, as our product takes care of everything.
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Home Design: After choosing the best loan offer, users can design their homes by themselves. We carry out the design process in a very interactive way and this would probably be the funniest part of our entire project :) So basically we will present the user with several rounds with random pictures of house components, house styles, colors, furniture, etc. and the user has to choose the one that attracts him the most in each round. By analyzing the user's selected images, the service recommends the design idea that would be most interesting to him.
Every project starts with a vision and so did ours. We took a fair amount of time to discuss about different ideas that we have. After narrowing it down to just two, we have decided for the project which has the bigger impact. We started noting down some functional requirements and created some mockups in order to visualize our thoughts. Packed with fresh minds and mockups, the last thing for us todo was to decide on the tech stack. Our prototype only required a front-end, so we have selected JavaScript, React and Bootstrap as our main languages and frameworks.
At this point it was time to generate mock data and finally start coding. Since the platform is also about offering houses to users and the companies API did not provide any, we decided to create some mock house sales around Munich. In the meantime the first views were built and successful API calls were executed.
Time flew and just before midnight we had a first working prototype. From there on, the main goal was to improve the UX until the submission deadline. We ended up having quite some TODOs left and did not tackle all pain points, but our vision has become reality. Challenges we ran into
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Ideation: We had a really tough brainstorming and discussion period as we had too many ideas initially. But the initial ideas were mostly basic, so we kept doubting and trying to refine the ideas. So we end up discussing it until the morning of the next day. Ultimately, and fortunately, we settled on this idea.
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Technical Implementation: All our team members are better at the backend than the frontend, but we end up implementing a product that mainly uses the frontend frameworks, which is a real challenge for our whole group.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- As we mentioned above, as a team more towards the backend, we are proud that we implemented a cool project with mainly frontend tech stacks in such a tight time limit.
- Our cool interface implemented by react and bootsrtrap :)
all of our members have received intensive input from frontend staff and refreshed our existing knowledge in the field of API and data analysis. Most importantly, we learned to manage teamwork efficiently while having fun. Our team has a really good team atmosphere and we also share the workload evenly. What's next for Interhyp