KW Rental Radar
Finding a house in KW is difficult. Hopefully this makes it a bit easier.
KW Rental Radar (KWRR) is a project by David Anderson created initially to help him search for a new rental house.
This project solves the real world problem of Kitchener Waterloo’s housing market being extremely competitive. This tool allowed David to be the first to respond to a new home listing Waterloo, which he then rented!
The project consists of two main parts, Data Collection, and the Data Presentation.
Data collection is performed by a Python script which is scheduled to run every 5 minutes as a Google Cloud function. It checks 3 rental listing sites for houses matching David’s family needs, normalizes their data, then stores any new listings in a Firestore database. If there were new listings, the script then sends a text message to him via the Twilio API with the number of new listings and their sources.
The presentation is this NextJS site, hosted on Firebase. It taps into the Firestore collection of listings and displays the 30 most recently found listings.
Finding a house in KW is difficult. Hopefully this makes it a bit easier.