RateALandlordA7HauckOrinPitts

RateALandlordA7HauckOrinPitts

To Do

• please work as a group (3-5 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)
• Be prepared to give a 5-10 minute presentation about your project in class so the other students and the instructors are aware of your plans

Task

Please post in the Wiki:

• the project chosen and your description of it
• initial objectives
• why is the project of interest to you?
• how do you plan to approach the research?
• what do you expect to find out?
• what do you consider the major challenges?
• references identified
• questions you might have

Group response

1. Members of the Group

Mason Hauck, Amanda Orin, Stephanie Pitts

2. Project Description

BoulderLandlords.com:

College students at major universities often live off campus. The experience can be invaluable in learning how to find a place to live. Signing a lease and living in a home complete with kitchens, bathrooms, and carpets that need to be cleaned, used, and generally be taken care of, is experience that ends up being essential to functioning as an adult. This real world experience has its downside though. Student renters are almost always assumed to be irresponsible and to have low standards as to the quality of their living situation. Student renters are expected to have previous references and if they're first time renters they are often subjected to very high damage deposits.

The people they rent from, their landlords, are not subjected to such scrutiny. Students often end up with unreasonable landlord situations. There is no good way to gauge whether or not a landlord will show up randomly, or expect tenants to be available for showings of their properties, do not respond to urgent phone calls, return emails, or fix problems in a timely manner. These facts can make this otherwise invaluable experience a difficult and unmanageable one. "Slumlords" can make living off campus a nightmare. On the other hand, a great landlord can make all the difference. When a living situation is easy, being a student is considerably easier.

Many landlord rating sites exist. Two of the biggest and most widely known are http://ratemylandlord.com and http://www.pickalandlord.com. Both of these sites are a wealth of information on landlord research. Pickalandlord.com even goes as far as to have a search engine that includes a school by school search. However, neither of these sites and no other site that our group could find had any Boulder landlords. Our opinion is that as a digital and social system a website specifically designed for University of Colorado at Boulder students could be a very valuable tool. At Ohio State there is a very successful site of this nature which students "live by" according to a former Ohio State student.

One of the reasons we believe that the two websites listed above are not as useful as they could be is that they are not localized. At least for university students its important to be able to find a wealth of information on a very specific location. Our group believes that if we were to develop a site of this nature is would need to start specific to Boulder and perhaps expand to other university towns in Colorado and then to Colorado in general.

Another reason these sites have not grown in popularity is, in our opinion, that they have no information starting out. To make a website like this a successful tool a certain amount of legwork would need to be done from the get go to insure that there was a reason to visit, share, and continue use. Our group would like to develop an easy digital or paper questionnaire that we could have people fill out so that when the site was launched there would already be a lot of information for people to use to their advantage. This would fulfill the social significance from the birth of the site. We also believe that if it starts with information it will encourage people to come back.

We hope that by the end of the semester we will be able to have a GUI mock-up, a domain name, and a developed questionnaire. When we say "developed" we mean that as we find out what people answer we may find that we want to revise our initial questions to include things we find out are pertinent. At this point in time we'd like to have a starred rating system like "RateMyProfessors.com" along with an overall numerical rating based on an algorithm that will be developed as the project moves forward.

We believe this site is relevant to DSSF because it could be manifested as a community; a community of renters who want to recommend or reprimand landlords and a way for landlords to gauge themselves. It could even be used as a way for landlords to encourage good renters to rent from them. We believe that both renters and landlords should be held to certain standards and that one way to do that is to have socially engaging way to do it.

Our questions at the moment revolve mostly around legality. How we would conduct research is to develop an initial questionnaire and email it out to our friends, neighbors and classmates to get a basis for the types of problems and positives people have in renting. Then we'd redevelop. At the same time we could be developing a GUI and a way to dynamically store/change data. We should also probably meet with a professor from the law school to talk privacy problems. Another resource for this could be the admin for the sites like this that already exist. Overall, we believe this to be a project relevant to this course, and perhaps more importantly relevant to our lives and the lives of our peers.

3. Empty Field

Resources:

http://ratemylandlord.com - GUI not as friendly as it could be. No Colorado based information. Not college student specific.

http://www.pickalandlord.com/rsearchschool_c.php?s=21 - Good GUI, good product idea, but no University of Colorado landlords exist. The legwork still needs to be done.

http://www.ratemyprofessors.com - Similar environment to what we'd like to develop.

Laura Eitreim - Former Ohio State student