Rentable: A portal to streamline the process of securing and managing tenancies: Technical Report

Rentable is a web application that is developed for the rental market in Ireland, targeting both Landlords and Tenants. At the core of the application, it allows tenants to search for properties available to rent, and landlords to post properties for rent. Tenants can increase the efficiency of their property search by creating different watchlists and adding properties to the current active list by clicking an icon on the image of the property. Tenants can then go back through various watchlists to compare properties they are interested in and refine their choices. The search is a standard filtered search. Users can narrow down their search by specifying the desired attributed such as county, town, the minimum and max rent, bedrooms and bathrooms. The search results only show the matched properties (if any). Currently in Ireland, there is a huge shortage in properties available to rent. The landlord will be inundated with applications. A possible solution to this is the tenant search which is available to landlords in this application. Tenants will set their property preferences, and the landlord can select one of their active adverts and do a search for tenants whose preferences match or are like the property specs. This streamlines the tenant search for landlords (and tenants), as the landlord will only get relevant tenant results. A crucial element in this application is the ability to start a tenancy. This is essentially like a friend’s system that you will see in social media sites. Only the landlord can initiate the tenancy request, and once registered the tenancy can be managed. The management tools include a expense tracker for properties. Landlords can log an expense associated with one of their properties by entering some details such as title, cost, category, and date. Once logged, this data is used to generate various chart. Each property has its own unique chart, and then each landlord has a chart with the aggregated data from all properties. Benefits of this would be, a permanent record of expenses, without the worry of keeping track of receipts, and landlords can spot areas where they can potentially reduce expenses, and as a result make more money. Other features in this application include a private messaging system, an expense claimer for tenants so they can recoup outlay on their rental property, a feedback system, where tenants can air grievances, and inform the landlord on how the tenancy is going