What the rooms shipped.

Matthew LiGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

Disclosure is an open-source website that analyzes home damage and aims to inform the user of how and when to make repairs. This website is for any homeowner that has home damage of all severities. Also, the cool part is that it uses the AI model Gemma 4 along with TypeSafe AI to do the recognizing and categorizing of home damage through user uploaded images. Finally, the main Google tool we used throughout this project was Cloud Run to host the website, Gemma AI, and TypeSafe AI.

“We were pleasantly surprised by how well Gemma 4’s image classification worked with TypeSafe AI to get a consistent level of accuracy.”

Chris ChenGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

FixTrail turns a photo of a housing problem into a dated record, a response clock, and a repair notice, and shows when many households in one building report the same problem. When a repair request goes nowhere, renters often have no proof they ever asked. Complaints are usually made by phone, in passing, or in texts that get lost, so a landlord can say they never heard about it. If five households in a building have the same mold problem, nobody sees that it is one building-wide issue.

“I was surprised at Codex's programming capabilities after using Claude for most of my project development thus far. Codex apparently can now take control of your computer to interact with the browser and able to autonomously navigate it”

Jordan GangavarapuGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

Footing is a free app/website for people experiencing homelessness in Virginia, including immigrants whose papers decide which help they can get. You tell it your status, who’s with you, and what matters most, and it ranks all 133 Virginia cities and counties by where you’re most likely to get back on your feet. It shows which programs you can actually use there and where every number comes from. Your answers never leave your phone, there’s no account, and it works offline in 9 languages.

“We understand now why git is a industry standard as we tried to move files using google drive making collaboration 10 times harder. It went so much smoother after using githubs qualities.”

Yashwanth KadariGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

NestWise helps first-time renters understand the true cost of housing before signing a lease. It combines real housing data, financial analysis, and Google Gemini to uncover hidden fees, explain lease terms, and compare rental options. Its privacy first approach lets users redact personal information before AI processes their documents, helping them make more informed rental decisions.

“What surprised me most was how much work goes into data engineering before you can actually build useful features. Working with real housing data taught me how important it is to clean, organize, and connect different datasets, even when they come from different sources.”

Shreya BodankiGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

Lease Red-Flag Checker helps students, and anyone else renting a place, check the quality of their lease. The website lets users upload a PDF or text, which the program analyzes and turns into highlighted lines of flagged risk ranging from low to high. When users hover over a highlight, they see suggestions and the relevant law, and the site also drafts an email to their landlord. With links to the Virginia housing codes and student legal services, users can also look directly at their rights

“One of the interesting things I had to deal with was that even though the pasted text or uploaded PDF had the exact wording of the lease, the Gemma model would catch the questionable clauses but sometimes reword them when quoting them back instead of using the exact words. That meant the highlights couldn’t find the text on the page, so I had to add fuzzy matching to locate the original clause.”

InsiyahGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

RoomRoot helps people find housing and housemates who fit their routines, needs, and expectations. Users can build a housing profile or describe a space to share, compare lifestyle preferences, and use conversation prompts to talk through the details. The site also showcases room listings with practical details, an anonymous community for shared-housing advice, and RootSpace, a 3D room viewer for imagining and planning a space.

“I was surprised by how much finding a good home depends on everyday details people don’t usually discuss: quiet hours, guests, cleaning, and shared spaces. RoomRoot made me realize that helping people talk about those expectations early can matter just as much as finding an available room.”

Hoai VoGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

Housing AR allows users to not only find housing listings for them but also experience an immersive 3d experience of setting up their dream home remotely. It is very user-friendly so even people with no experiences in 3D development can easily set up their new home using their old furniture.

“I assumed the implementation of segmentation and reconstruction would be as easy as it was on 2D. It took a painstaking long time of troubleshooting and testing different apps for it to finally be able to reconstruct 3D objects.”

Umair BhalliGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

Clear House helps low-income people in Northern Virginia and Blacksburg find verified affordable housing, shelters and rent help, especially students and families in a crisis. Its AI chat answers only from checked resources, and it sends anyone in danger straight to 911, 211 and hotlines. The cool part: ask in plain words and get real phone numbers, walking times and a map of homes you can actually reach.

“We expected the AI to be the hard part, but the real problem was that a housing listing can’t tell you if the place is still open. So we built the whole site around that: every listing has a “Call to Confirm Availability” style button.”

Samuel FlynnGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

True Cost helps students at VT who are looking for off-campus housing see the actual price of housing after all the fees and be able to compare apartments side by side. Our database of over 200 apartments around VT gives VT Students plenty of options, and they can sort the database to their liking. Our Chrome extension allows them to, instead, choose an apartment that they like and scan the listing page and to find all the fees included and compare it to other apartments in our database.

“Something that surprised me was actually how simple it was to make a google extension. I have never done this before and I thought it was a long and tedious process, turns out it wasn't.”

Emma LeonardGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

This project to help people who are getting ready to move. The goal is to help find and budget for a new home! It gathers the cost information (i.e. moving cost, upfront costs, etc...) and (given a timeline of when you need to move) will create a budget to help you save up enough money to move!

“At first I thought that I would just have to hook up Gemma and it would do all the calculations and searching for me. Now I know that Gemma just really handles the input and what to do with it but the heavy calculations and searches are built separately and Gemma calls those.”

Ritvik KancharlaGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

True Cost of Rent reads a rental listing from a screenshot or link and works out what the place really costs each month, including the utilities, fees and commute the listing leaves out. It flags every charge the listing never mentioned and writes the questions to ask before you sign. It is built for first time renters, and across ten real listings the advertised price understated the true cost by 23 percent. Gemini reads and explains, and Python does all the math.

“I wrote a rule telling Gemini not to touch the roommate count on shared listings, and it changed it anyway, which doubled a rent share and made one place look twice as expensive. I found it by testing my own app, and the fix was moving the rule out of the prompt and into code.”

Mayank GoelGDG AI for Good - Housing - Virginia Tech · Mann Patel

HomeCrew lets renters video-call an AI crew and just point their phone at what’s broken. Rosa spots the problem, Theo tells you which Virginia law makes it your landlord’s job, and June writes the repair letter for you. It’s for Virginia renters, who almost never have a lawyer when something goes wrong. It also tells you when something is yours to fix and how, or when you need a pro.

“Gemma kept calling the hole in our friend’s door a bug on the wall. Getting closer made it worse; what fixed it was filming from farther back with the doorknob in frame, so context mattered more than detail.”