Overview
Finding a kot (a student room) means scrolling through listings that never quite match what you’re looking for, and putting one online is a chore for landlords. Kotzoeker brings both sides together on one platform. Students describe what they want in their own words and semantic search finds the rooms that fit, not just the ones that happen to use the right keywords. Landlords get tools that make putting a kot online quick.
Kotzoeker is still in progress. This is what’s there so far, and where it’s going.
What’s built
- Accounts for students and landlords with Supabase Auth: email and password, a magic link or Google, and row-level security so landlords can only touch their own listings.
- A landlord dashboard to add and edit a kot, with a checklist that shows what’s still missing before it can be published.
- Photo uploads straight from a phone: the browser compresses every photo to WebP, makes a thumbnail and strips the GPS data before anything is uploaded.
- A public page for every kot, with a photo gallery, the key facts and amenities, ready to share in a group chat.
What’s next
- Semantic search: students describe their ideal kot in plain words, and listings are matched on meaning, combined with filters like budget, campus and travel time by bike, on foot or by public transport.
- More tools that speed up listing a kot for landlords.
- Favourites, messages between students and landlords, and booking a viewing.
Stack
A TypeScript monorepo with Turborepo: Next.js for the web app, NestJS for the API, Postgres on Supabase with Drizzle ORM, and Zod schemas shared between front end and back end. Vitest and Playwright tests run on every pull request in GitHub Actions.