Final Report: Boulder Landlords: A five-star landlord rating system

Title:

Boulder Landlords

Authors:

Mason Hauck, Amanda Orin, Stephanie Pitts

Abstract:

The focus of this project is the design and initial implementation steps involved in creating an online landlord evaluation website. This site is oriented toward renters and landlords in the Boulder area with a particular focus on University of Colorado students. This site is designed so that users are able to easily locate information relevant to selecting a landlord to rent from. Some data about landlords, gathered using a questionnaire, is put on the site by administrators when the site is launched. The majority of data available on the website is added by users of the site using the same form used to conduct the initial questionnaire.

Keywords:

landlord, landlady, renter, Boulder, student housing, off-campus, property, lease, evaluation, rating

Statement of the Problem:

In the University town of Boulder Colorado there are many housing options. A student can live on campus the dorms, in a University owned apartment, or off-campus. The option of living off campus adds many dimensions of complexity to the living situation. A student must find roommates, a home within their budget and that meets their standards of living. They do this by searching online, through classifieds, and on the University of Colorado Off-Campus Students Services web page. Once a property is found, they must then pay bills and rent on time, sometimes for the first time in their lives.

One aspect of off-campus living that a student has very little control over is their landlord. This project attempts to facilitate a way to address this particular difficulty. A socially aware site directed towards University Students can address their needs, desires, and problems with landlords. It holds landlords accountable and makes the students more responsible for their living situation. It adds another level to services already offered by sites like Ralphie's List.

When this project began there were many aspects of the social connotations of such a system that needed to be researched. There was worry that the only people who would respond to a rating site such as this would have very negative things to say about their landlord, and thus the data would not be useful. It quickly became evident that this is not actually the case once the initial survey was posted. Another worry was that a site like this already existed and we'd be entirely reinventing the wheel. Our research showed this assumption to be false as well. It is true that sites similar to the one this project proposes do exist, however none exist which are geared towards the University of Colorado community. This void presents the major hurdle of upstart failure. Without information to post to the site immediately upon implementation, user participation will rapidly to trickle to a standstill. The other motivation for approaching this problem is to implement this particular service in a way that is easily accessible and clearly communicates the necessary information. Ultimately, the primary problems to address are the actual implementation of the site (in a technical sense), and understanding the user needs and asking the right questions of contributors.

Rationale:

Students at the University of Colorado are who we hope would be most affected by this project. It is important to their lives because off-campus living is an integral part of the college experience. It allows students to get an idea of what life beyond the university is like and prepares them for owning their own homes and renting apartments after graduation. A poor landlord situation can make this experience much more difficult and trying than it needs to be. It can end up being detrimental to the students' private, social, and school lives. If students can come together to praise good landlords and hold bad ones accountable, they can have much more control over the quality of life in rental situations in Boulder.

Relationship to the Course:

This project relates a number of the topics discussed this semester in the Digital and Social Systems Foundations course. The Boulder Landlords website is intended to act as a resource in the community of Boulder area renters and landlords. This community correlates to the system's place in the four circles of relationships. Because this system is designed such that most of the data is user generated, it relies heavily on the concept of user participation. This data is centralized and made usable through the Collect-Relate-Create-Donate development process. Another important concept to consider in regards to this project is that of user motivations. It is necessary to include an initial collection of data about landlords upon implementation so that the system is useful enough to attract users. If the system cannot initially motivate people to use it, it undergoes upstart failure and will not grow due to user contributions. A large database of information is not the only aspect of a system necessary to attract users, the system must also be able to relate the data to users in a way that is simple, easily understandable and comprehensive enough to be helpful.

Contribution of Individual Team Members:

Mason Hauck: Basic system design, aided with research portions including public interest and OCSS.

Amanda Orin: Primary system implementation.

Stephanie Pitts: Research components, initial questionnaire, OCSS research.

Description of Independent Research:

1.Technical Approach-

The social system described by this project relies on four primary tools. These are the world wide web, a user interface, a database, and a questionnaire. The world wide web is the means by which the community of users access the system from any personal computer. The user interface is what users see and how they access the system's tools and data. This is implemented in html code so that a web browser on the user's computer can be used to view and interact with the user interface. The data exists as part of a database which serves to store, organize and access the data needed by users. The final primary tool which makes up the system is a questionnaire. This questionnaire is the means by which users contribute new data to the system for use by others. This questionnaire defines the information that can be contributed to the system by users and makes it easy for users to submit important information.

We tried to map our approach to this problem in ways similar to some of those discussed in Leonardo's Laptop. Some of the examples of graphical user interfaces in chapter four were a basis for how we designed our own. In particular, we attempted to design our interface to make information accessible. We used simple fields and drop down menus to solicit user information. This is similar to the way southwest.com presents and gathers information as discussed on page 66 of the text. We also focused our design toward the Collect-Relate-Create-Donate implementation method from chapter six. This we did by collecting information relevant to our task, relating ideas and initial data collected from our survey, creating a basis for our website, and are currently in the process of donating it to our student community via Off-Campus Student Services here at CU. We have found that multiple iterations of some of these phases will be necessary to create a successful system. We are still in the process of collecting data and refining the information that will gathered and disseminated.

We found our approach to be quite different from the e-business chapter in many ways. Though our project relates to businesses in that it affects businesses and could probably be presented as a business model, we have chosen to donate our project. It is similar in that like many projects in chapter seven we are using the internet to get our project out to the public. We are also allowing comments and user ratings to help create a community around our product. We are trying to avoid only representing unhappy customers and have found that users seem fairly positive about the idea. We are doing a different sort of user evaluation by analyzing our results before going public. We're also doing a lot of back end work to get statistics like how many properties a landlord or company owns and what how many of what type of property they own as well. We are not using personalization, something that chapter seven focuses on quite a bit. We feel that personalization doesn't make sense for this site as it's informational as opposed to actually selling a product.

2. Description of the system-

The system consists of two main portions: the interface with which a user interacts, and the backend databases and structure that holds/stores the information about landlords and keep the site running. The surface interface is the site itself, viewable in one's web browser with fairly straightforward navigation; this is the only part of the system that the community sees and interacts with. The backend is the portion that site/server administrators and we as the designers deal with - this involves the code and systems involved in running a server and maintaining the databases used within the system in some way (in our case it involves the use of SQL databases and most likely an Apache server since they are the most common to host websites presently). The site code, written in PHP, can make secure calls to the SQL databases and use the information stored within those databases as needed within the code (it varies from page to page depending on what the page was designed to do).

3. Description of the system behavior-

The site default home page would be a combination of things to do on the site - login/register as a member, perform a quick browse/search for a particular landlord, or submit a new landlord to the rating system. The login/register function involves accessing a database of registered members of the site; the other two functions involve a separate database of landlords stored on the server. So, for example, someone that wishes to submit a new landlord to the rating system would fill out the form with the minimum required information about a landlord and upon the press of the submit button, the site would securely access the database of landlords to do a brief scan for the new entry (to see if someone else had already created an entry for this particular landlord or property), and if no matches were found then the entry is added to the database and would be search able on the site within a matter of minutes (depending on how we implemented administrative checks on comments).

4. Evaluation of the program / system-

We had two meetings with University of Colorado at Boulder Off-Campus Student Services. The head of that program granted me an hour long meeting where discussed past attempts to get a site like this up and running in Boulder and some of the problems we might encounter. One of the main problems they're worried about is slanderous or irrelevant information being given to students as concrete information. They want the information given to take into account how many residences a property managers owns and operates versus how many responses they have. The initially felt allowing students to leave comments about their landlord could lead to defamatory remarks. However, after discussing with them factors such as accountability and how to build a community around a digital system we came to the agreement that comments were in fact very very important to that end.

The second meeting was with the OCSS legal counsel. He was very concerned about getting a good input pool, perhaps having the registrar select students from all neighborhoods and telephoning them for responses (the method Ohio State uses to generate data). He was also concerned about defamatory remarks but said that if comments were monitors and statistics about property owners given then the risk would be reduced greatly. One idea that came out of our discussions with OCSS was the idea of building a database over several years before launching a site. This is because in the past OCSS has sent out landlord reviews for students and only gotten back about 1000 responses each time. They're not comfortable saying that that number is representative of all student experiences. We explained to them our upstart findings and that they shouldn't expect high response numbers until there existed an advantage and community around their system. That's when we had the idea to maybe send out the survey several years running and get chronological data as well as a good back end database. We feel that using OCSS as a resource will greatly enhance our ability to get this site up and running. Thus, the system works well so long as the community is involved in contributions to the database that holds the information about landlords/managers and the properties they manage - the fewer contributors, the fewer search results to use as an aide in the decision-making process of finding a new place to live in Boulder. Limitations to the system would theoretically be server storage space or bandwidth issues if and when the site went live - e.g. server crashes, server bandwidth restrictions, etc. At this point there still is not a graphical map-out feature for property locations, but as we move forward this is definitely a feature we plan to implement.

5. In the future-

We hope this project will get implemented as an addition to the services already provided by Off-Campus Student Services. We feel this project follows what OCSS attempts to accomplish. We have already had two meetings with them, and hope to see this project open to the student body in the eventual. We have another meeting with OCSS this coming Wednesday and then we're appearing in front of the landlord-tenant advisory board at their January meeting (after break), to pitch the idea and have them issue an opinion. This is to get some initial reaction as to how other students as well as local landlords feel about this idea. We feel that this will allow a true community to form that is fair, balanced, and useful.

References:

Off-Campus Student Services - University of Colorado, December 3, 2008 and December 5, 2008 http://www.colorado.edu/OCSS/

Off-Campus Student Services - Ohio State University, http://offcampus.osu.edu/

Student Government - Ohio State University, http://usg.osu.edu/

Landlord Tenant Advisory Board - University of Colorado

http://www.ApartmentFinder.com/

http://www.RateYourProfessors.com/

Campus Legal Services - University of Colorado http://www.colorado.edu/studentaffairs/legal/

Leonardo's Laptop, Human Needs and The New Computing Technologies, Ben Shneidermann, First MIT Press 2003, Copyright 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology