u/Legitimate-Rope6600

You know that thing where you have 12 tabs open, one per leasing company, trying to remember which one had the unit under $900, and giving up halfway through?

Yeah. That's over now.

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UIUC Housing AI is live🎉🎉🎉 Here's what it does:

🌽 Two ways to search

If you already know what you want (beds, budget, move-in date), there‘re card/table/map filter views.

If you don't know yet, or you just have general questions like "is it too late to find a place" or "what's the average price near Grainger", there's a chat mode where you can ask instead of digging through dropdowns.

🌽 Price per bed, finally, not "starting at"

No more "starting at $X" that's actually for the studio while the unit you want is double that per bed. Every listing shows the real price per bed for that exact unit.

🌽 Every company in one search

Green Street Realty and University Group are both in there. Compare across companies instead of switching tabs.

🌽 A map that actually helps

Every listing plotted relative to campus, so "0.4 miles" isn't a mystery that turns into a 20 minute walk in January.

Free, built for UIUC students!!!!

Two years ago in mid-June I got my UIUC transfer offer.

Two years ago today, July 3rd, I signed the 4B4B that turned into a total nightmare. If you saw my earlier post, you know the story.

Two years later, on this exact date, I used the CS I've been learning at UIUC since then to build something that hopefully saves other people from spending hours across a dozen tabs just trying to figure out what's actually available!

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Coming back with an update on this project. It's basically done at this point, just made a bunch of changes recently.

Biggest one: search is now split into two modes.

1. If you're not sure what you want yet, or you have general questions like "when should I start looking," "when are prices lowest," "do prices go up after the semester starts," you can just type it in plain language and it'll walk you through it.
2. If you already know exactly what you're looking for, you can go straight to map view or card view and filter from there.

Been polishing the UI too, and messing around with AI to generate some nicer visuals for the project page.

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The project is launching very soon!!!!!!!!! Invitation links start going out today.

If you're interested, feel free to join the waitlist, first batch of invites will go out to people already on there.

>Not trying to do the fake scarcity thing, just being honest: this is my first time actually launching something like this, and I genuinely don't know what kind of traffic to expect. Rolling it out to the waitlist first is mostly so I can make sure everything actually works smoothly before opening it up to everyone, don't want anyone's first experience to be a broken page or a site that's crawling.

Thanks for following along with this, means a lot !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Two years ago I was apartment hunting online before coming to UIUC.

I thought all the studios near campus were gone, so I signed a 4b4b figuring "eh, it's roughly the same price and closer to class."

Big mistake!!!!!!!!

During the roommate search, everyone said they didn't smoke.
Then they moved in and started smoking inside the apartment.
At one point they were literally stubbing out cigarettes in our shared drinking glasses. lol

They also said no overnight guests.
A few days after move-in, we had a little house meeting and one roommate casually mentioned her boyfriend might stay "2 or 3 days." He stayed for two weeks. yeah.

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About a month in, I found a studio within walking distance that was well within my budget. Only about $100/month more than what I was paying!!!!!!!!!!

The problem wasn't that affordable studios didn't exist. I just gave up too early and didn't have a good way to compare options.

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Fast forward two years. I'm deep into UIUC CS now, and I figured I'd actually do something about this.

So I built uiuc-housing-ai — an apartment search tool specifically for UIUC students.

The problem with apartment hunting here：

1. You end up with 15 tabs open, Green Street, University Group, MHM, Dean Campustown, 707, Hub, Smile, and a bunch of others, manually comparing rent, utilities, what's furnished, what's actually available.
2. Apartments.com listings are often stale too, showing units that are already gone.

So I wrote a legal web scraper that pulls fresh listings regularly from the actual property management sites.

Things first-time renters often miss

1. Frat row and bar proximity.
You might love an apartment on paper, sign the lease, and then realize every nice-weather evening in fall and spring means an outdoor party right outside your window.

2. Actual distance math.
Instead of vague "near campus" labels, the tool uses lat/lng to calculate real walking distances to your classes, grocery stores, whatever you care about.

3. Views
Card, Table, and Map — browse however makes sense to you.

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Built this mostly for incoming students, especially non-local students hunting remotely without older friends to ask. Hopefully it saves someone from my particular situation.

Happy to answer questions about the tech stack, the scraping approach, or UIUC housing in general...