Abstract
Have you ever wondered how you may possibly locate a rental property as rapidly as
possible without wasting your valuable time calling each potential rental one at a time or
searching the neighborhood for one? But you're not by yourself. In densely populated,
developing countries like Ethiopia, it is getting more and harder to find a rentable property. Most
Ethiopians rely on word of mouth or move from cajoler to cajoler to obtain a livable home. This
activity, which would otherwise take a very long time if done manually, may now be completed
in as little time as browsing the website to check into potential rentable homes.Any website
visitor will now have access to potential rental homes with his or her specified price ranges,
locations, and other details of his or her desire to easily locate his or her rental home.
Additionally, a personal platform for lessors will be available, enabling them to rent their homes
more quickly and without having to pay any money to intermediaries.
1.1 Background
In today’s digital world, it is essential for customers to have an online marketplace where they
can rent their homes without any brokers that charge high prices and high commission fees.
Because our country is primarily concentrated in major cities such as Addis Abeba, Bahir Dar,
Adama, and Hawassa, there is a significant shortage in accessing homes for its citizens, and the
websites that are available in our country provide only access for large houses, apartments, and
guest houses which for the majority of the people aren’t affordable. Additionally, the home seller
and renter invest a huge amount of money to get the client to show their homes, providing a
platform for their market expansion and investing huge amounts of money in advertising. The
client must obtain all available real estate, rental homes, and villa homes in order to connect with
the provider. The online marketplace will cut the time, money, and related expenses for
searching and getting a full overview of the homes. In addition, many Ethiopians who also live
outside the country want homes in their home country and get rental homes when they arrive in
their country as soon as possible before their departure. It will enhance the digital real estate for
our country and the horn in the future.
Most Ethiopians live outside of the main cities, traveling back and forth to these cities where
rental homes are not available as soon as they arrive, wasting time and investing large sums of
money in their arrival homes. Ethiopia is the second most populous and the fifth least urbanized
country in Africa. At present, 21% of Ethiopia’s 112 million residents live in urban areas (23.5
million people),according to the national definition.Although significantly below the subSaharan
average of 40.4%, Ethiopia’s urban population is expected to grow considerably over the next
few decades: the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia (CSA) projects that the urban population
will increase to 42.3 million by 2037, growing at 3.8% per year, while the World Bank projects
this growth at a higher rate of 5.4% per year so by connecting all through the actors our projects
will make affordable and easy access of homes for this high population rise around the major
cities.
Cities face particularly marked housing affordability challenges, with strong demand for urban
housing and rising housing prices around the country, due in part to increasing urbanization
rates.At the same time, cities are facing sustainability challenges. It has a range of economic,
social, and environmental issues including lower productivity. National governments thus have
to address two urgent policy objectives simultaneously.
● providing adequate, resilient and affordable housing; and
● delivering compact urban development.
The project will make
● Saved searches to effortlessly connect with potential lessees.
● Extensive led search that shows exactly what a lessors and lessees looked at.
● Enhanced listing.
● One-click favorites.
● Always up-to-date information.
● Time saving
● Intuitive navigation
Our project's customers will be people with internet access at any level of economic
development. It will range from the lower economic class to the higher economic class. The
project will provide a new enhanced and hassle free access for the client. There will be no
additional costs for this project as long as real estate agents and home renters agree to this market
expansion through our website. The participants in these projects will be the government, real
estate owners, home renters, and all other actors that will benefit from the successful
accomplishment of this project. Our projects need the government's intervention in making the
internet accessible for all users in the country to make our website accessible to all of the
citizens.
The project will also include commercial real estate for the merchants, home towns,
condominiums, and single family-homes. Thus our project will have a role in this regard to rent
a house for everyone easily.The vast majority of the nation's population will profit from the
project's successful completion .
1.2 The Existing System
Nowadays getting a home to rent is much harder than we think. There are numerous issues that
can be cited as reasons why finding a house to rent is difficult. The main contributing reason for
the problem stated before is the drawback of the current techniques that are in use. According to
our research in Ethiopia, there are two methods for renting houses (the lessor-lessee connection).
The first system that almost all house seekers use is through cajoler, in this system, the lessor
tells the cajoler that he or she has a house to rent, and the cajoler (who has connections with
many others) will find someone who seeks a house. On the side of the lessee, he or she will find
a cajoler to find a house for him/her, so the lessor and the lessee are connected through a third
party (i.e., the cajoler). The biggest disadvantage of this method is that after the lessee receives
the house, he or she must go and see if it is what he or she desires. So this technique will result in
the following problems:
● It consumes much time of the lessee, resource and the like
● The presence of cajoler make both the lessor and lessee to pay much for him
The second system, which doesn't have that many users, is through the use of websites like
"Ethiopian Property Center" (https://ethiopiapropertycentre.com), "realethio"
(https://www.realethio.com), and https://www.qefira.com/am/services. In our view, these
websites are not effective, and they are not specific to the basic problem that we are going to
address. Compared to our website , this websites in addition to house rents they work on lease
and sales more specifically for high costing houses. Directly or indirectly, these websites are
prepared for the rich. But as we know, the economic status of most people in our country is not
good, which means that the “Ethiopian Property Center” website and other websites don’t
address the main problem of a low-income population. So we plan to be fair to both high- and
low-income populations in addressing their problems.
1.3 Statement of the problem
Ethiopia is the second most populated country on the continent. This population is more
concentrated around cities, including the capital Addis Ababa and other main cities like Adama,
Bahir Dar, Hawassa. Being a densely populated country has both advantages and disadvantages.
One of these side effects is a shortage of housing. And indeed most of the population live in a
house of rent.
To understand the problem in detail, let's see the capital city, Addis Ababa, where many of the
people live in rented houses that are far from the center of the city. The reason for many people
renting a house away is in order to get affordable houses. And such houses will be far from
workplaces. In addition to these, the transportation problem in Addis makes the issue even
worse. On average, it may take over an hour and a half to reach the workplace. This has a direct
effect on the economy of the country as the working hours are being affected. Additionally,
wasting this much time affects the social lives of the people because there will not be time for
social life activities.
But, before all of this, it is difficult to obtain housing, even in areas far from workplaces. It could
take anywhere from a week to a month to find a house in the desired location at an affordable
price. During this time span, the home seeker wastes many resources which may not be noticed
by most people.
There are many houses in the center of Addis which we think are affordable and which the
available websites don’t include. In our system, we plan to include any available affordable
houses, especially houses that most people don’t know exist. Hopefully these will solve the
problems of many people easily and will save the resources that will be wasted.
1.4 Objective of the Project
1.4.1 General Objective
This project's main objective is to make renting a home easier by letting potential lessors post
information about their properties, including their pricing, images, videos, and other details, on a
straightforward website and publicize any homes that are now available for rent.
1.4.2 Specific Objective
This project will also include the following specific objectives:
❖ Saving the consumption of time,money of clients to see each renting homes by
meandering in each village and present in person.
❖ Enabling each individual to see all renting home information without tiring .
❖ Helping lessors by advertising their homes to be rented .
❖ Decreasing the necessity of cajolers to connect lessor and lessee.
❖ Creating online platform where anyone can access the homes they really want
❖ Making online marketplace where everyone can buy, sell and rent their homes without
any brokers that try to make high prices and high commission fees on clients.
1.5) Proposed System
The vast majority of the nation's population will profit from the project's successful completion.
The system is a web-based program that allows a homeowner who leases out a home to submit
the property's photographs, address, rental price, square footage, owner's phone number, house
license, and other related details. The website will then display the house and all of its related
details.
Users of the web app may easily access the web app without having to register and view the
houses that are available nearby or in any other location they like. They can then choose the
property of their choice, get more information about it, and get in touch with the owner to
discuss renting the home.
1.6 Feasibility Study
A feasibility study is an assessment of the practicality of a proposed plan or project.
1.6.1. Economic Feasibility
An analysis of the project's cost and revenues in an effort to determine whether or not it is logical
and possible to complete is the idea of an economic feasibility study. we'll try to view the
economic feasibility of the project's development and operating costs
1.6.1.1. Developmental cost
Cost of personnel is excluded as it’s going to be developed by students on the project. The
department assigned consultants therefore advisory fee isn’t an issue. The development softwares
are open source and uses our own computers and other hardware in addition to that we are going
to build our web based application by ourselves along with the help of our advisors so there is no
need for additional manpower. Therefore, we have no developmental cost.
1.6.1.2. Operational Cost
Operational costs of the proposed system are maintenance, personnel and hosting fees.
Additional hard wares and their maintenance down the road can be considered as a downside of
implementing the automated system.
For this project to be up and running, we are going to have to rent a web server to host the
website and also a domain name.
1.6.2. Technical Feasibility
Technical feasibility is a standard practice for companies to conduct feasibility studies before
commencing work on a project. Businesses undertake a technical feasibility study to assess the
practicality and viability of a product or service before launching it. Whether you are working as
a product engineer, product designer or team manager, there may be plenty of situations in your
career where you are required to prepare a technical feasibility study. In this article, we discuss
the technical feasibility, of our projects.
our web systems require the technical feasibility of hardware device such as laptop or desktop
and some software tools and manpower so,all of us have laptop and we use some frame works to
simply develop our project and e. Our team is composed of enough man power with specific
responsibilities and To access our web system by any device that use internet and reads browser
at least smart phone is enough.the most of peoples in current day have smart phone and most
parts of our country especially towns have network connections and who renting house and who
rented house simply access our system by their phone don’t expected to them go computer cafe
and connect to IT professioners to access our system.
1.6.3. Schedule Feasibility
The development process of this project is dynamic but we can complete all the features listed in
section [1.7] by the time frame allocated in the project management plan in section [1.9]
1.7 Scope
Two users were connected by the system: lessors and lessees. Lessors post information about the
rental Houses they are offering, including price, videos, and photos of the available Houses.
lessee can easily access the houses that are available, which are organized by price and
location .To deliver these services in an efficient way, our system enables the group of users to
perform the following tasks:
lessors:
● Have a login page that the lessor can only access using their email and password.
● Uploads houses for rent including price, photos,videos and locations
● provides the necessary contact details so that a potential customer can get in touch with
lessors.
● Uploads legal documents to verify that the house is legal and legitimate.
● Can notify the system and delete the uploaded house if the house is rented
● Can get information how many peoples starts dealing for rent the specific house
lessees:
● can access the uploaded houses that are available for rent, categorized by location and
price.
● can see the details of the house he is interested in.
● can access how many people start dealing with the lessor.
● can access lessor contact if he wants to start dealing with the lessor
● can access the related legal document to the uploaded house to confirm that the house is
both legitimate and legal.
The system:
● The system will be compatible with different size of screens(Desktop, Tablet or Mobile)
1.8 METHODOLOGY
1.8.1 Data Collection Method
People we expect to use our website are lessors and potential lessees. We tried to collect data
from our potential consumers by interviewing them in person. Our website will be able to
function by collecting data from lessors by using its input field.
1.8.2 Description Of Data
We will collect our data from lessors. The data includes a picture of the house that will be rented,
its price, its location, the phone number of the lessor, prerequisites that are expected from the
lessee, and any other information that can facilitate the negotiation between the lessor and the
lessee. After collecting all the necessary data from lessors we will display them on our website
so that any one who is looking for a renting house will use that information to make his life
easier.
1.8.3 Implementation
Implementation Methodology
We are planning to implement this project by using incremental delivery methodology. We have
chosen incremental delivery methodology because we want our website to be flexible and
continuously evolving. Our plan is to start small and to grow into a big service provider. This
methodology is implemented by defining the requirements, by designing, developing, testing and
deploying in a cyclic way so that we will keep on improving our website based on our
consumers' needs.
Functional Requirements
To define the requirements we decided to go out into the real world and see if anyone wants our
services. We did this by making each member of the group to interview 3 potential consumers in
person. Since the group consists of 10 students, by this approach we were able to interview 30
people. We interviewed 5 cajolers, 12 potential lessees and 13 lessors. After interviewing these
people and seeing their response we understood the functional requirements of our website.
● The website should be able to show the picture and if possible the video of the house.
● The website should be able to show full information about the house including price and
location.
● The website should be reliable this means only houses which are actually for rent should be
displayed
● The website should allow the lessors to update informations about the house
● Our website should be easy to use and its performance should be very good. Since most of our
users are going to be ordinary people, making the website complex and allowing it to lag will be
an unforgivable mistake.
Constraints
Our biggest constraints are :-
TIME: One of the biggest constraints developers encounter in their journeys is TIME. We are no
exception. We are given 2 months to finish the project and we will work hard to finish the
project with all its functionalities before the deadline.
PAYMENT: One of the functional requirements of our website was enabling users to perform
online payments for renting a house. But when we inspected this functionality we realized that it
is very risky to make people pay online because there is a very high possibility by which our
users may get scammed through our website. So for now we decided to exclude the online
payment function and to include it after we already gain the trust and respect of our consumers.
MAINTAINABILITY: If we succeed in our project that means we will have thousands of users.
It will be hard to store, retrieve and display data of thousands from a database and also we have
to make sure that our website will not crash when thousands of people are using it
simultaneously.
Tools
Since we have defined our constraints and functional requirements it is time to talk about the
actual implementation. Our plan is to build the front end of the website by using html, css and
javascript since we are learning them in web development class. Additionally we will use
frameworks such as bootstrap and angular to make our life easier. Our plan for the backend
development is to use a programming language javascript and also we plan to use node.js
frameworks to add more functionality to our website. For data storage we will use mysql
database.
Test
While building our website we will test it by using a unit testing method. Our plan is to
scrutinize the smallest testable parts of our website individually and independently to ensure
proper operation. Then we move to the user testing method because it is compatible with our
incremental delivery methodology. We will start by making our website accessible for only a
few people and by seeing their response and tracking our website's performance we will try to
make sure our website will be as maintainable as possible.
1.9 Project Management plan
1.9.1 Time Management plan
ID Task Name Start Finish Duration Completed
1 Project title 12/03/2015 14/03/2015 2 days 100%
2 Title approval 15/03/2015 16/03/2015 1days 100%
and
presentation
3 Selection of 17/03/2015 19/03/2015 2 days 100%
Methodology
4 Bring 20/03/2015 22/03/2015 2 days 100%
Information
5 Writing 23/03/2015 25/03/2015 2 days 100%
proposal
6 Validity of 26/03/2015 28/03/2015 2 days 100%
proposal
7 Requirement 29/03/2015 4/04/2015 5 days 0%
analysis
8 Data collection 5/04/2015 15/04/2015 10 days 0%
9 Validity of 16/04/2015 21/04/2015 5 days 0%
data
10 Design 22/04/2015 27/04/2015 5 days 0%
11 Implementatio 28/04/2015 10/05/2015 12 days 0%
n
12 Testing 11/05/2015 16/05/2015 5 days 0%
13 Feedback 17/05/2015 18/05/2015 1 day 0%
14 Finalizing the 19/05/2015 22/05/2015 3 days 0%
project
of risks are solved by our project using better 1.9.2 Quality
Management Plan
Quality is one of the major goals for our project and it refers to the degree of a
component, process as well as the system conforms to specific requirements or
expectations. Quality Management serves as a tool for organizations to ensure that the
products and services they offer have consistent quality. It basically comprises four
important components namely: Quality Control, Quality Assurance, Quality
Improvement, and Quality Planning.
The objective is not just on the quality of products, it’s also on the means to
achieve it. Quality is all about the product’s, process, or system performance as per its
intended functions.Our quality management plan can help the project to meet and
compile with defined or standardized quality specifications. Before designing the
application we meet our teacher to ensure our idea brings a better quality. This helps our
project to satisfy the Reliability, Usability, Efficiency, Security as well as
Maintainability.
One of the potential risks in many projects is inadequate project management, it
can create low productivity and it brings different problems in quality assurance. Our
project can reduce these kinds of problems with better project management tools by
creating opportunities for people involvement, advanced process approach and customer
focus. The other potential risk that can affect the quality of the project is schedule and
technical risk. These kinds time management methods. Furthermore there are many
potential risks affecting the quality of the projects such as :
Schedule risks:
❖ Time is not estimated perfectly
❖ Improper resource allocation
❖ Frequent project scope expansion
❖ Failure in function identification and its’ completion
operational risks
❖ Insufficient resources
❖ Conflict between tasks and employees
❖ Improper management of tasks
❖ No proper planning about project
❖ Less number of skilled project members
❖ Lack of communication and cooperation
❖ Lack of clarity in roles and responsibilities
Technical Risks
❖ Frequent changes in requirement, Less use of future
technologies
❖ Less number of skilled employee
❖ High complexity in implementation
❖ Improper integration of modules
All the above risks can be solved in our project using good risk management
skills, Risk Management is the process to identify, evaluate, and prioritize the risks in
order to monitor, control, and minimize the probabilities of certain unfortunate error
occurrences. It enables organizations to make informed decisions based on the risks
identified and keep the quality quotient of the products intact, maintaining a stronger
relationship with customers, suppliers, and their own people. Our project use active
project management tools to:
➔ Ensure that all the risks are considered from the very beginning itself
and kept into consideration throughout the process approach.
➔ Be proactive with their actions as a part of their strategic planning.
➔ Identify the opportunities to improve the system, processes, and
workflows.
➔ Identify risks and their triggers and Classify and prioritize all risks.
➔ Craft a plan that links each risk to a mitigation and Monitor for risk
triggers during the project
➔ Implement the mitigating action if any risk materializes and
Communicate risk status throughout project
Communication Management Plan
Type of Method/Tool Frequency/ Purpose Participants/
communicati schedule Responsible
on
Internal Communication:
Project Meeting In person Two days in a Review the status of the Internal project
Meeting week at 6pm project and Identify the team(group
potential risks can affect our members)
project
Project Update Social Weekly Discuss strange things and Internal project
media(Telegra immediate issues in the team(group
m, email) project members)
Team Stand up Social Daily Discuss what each team Internal project
media(Telegra members did yesterday and team(group
m, email) what they will do today members)
Project Review In person Weekly Evaluate desirable, discuss Internal project
Meeting next step and gather team(group
feedback from the group members)
members
Project Status Social At scheduled Provide updates on project Internal project
media(Telegra Milestone status , highlight any risks team(group
m, email) and challenges members)
Task Progress In person Daily Provide daily progress on Internal project
Updates Meeting assigned tasks team(group
members)
Project In person At the end of Reflect on Project Internal project
Evaluation Meeting the project performance, Identify the team(group
lessons learned and members)
Investigate the efficiency of
our project.
External Communication and report:
Project Report Social Monthly To provide information on Our teacher, Our
media(Linked the output of planning and senior and other
in, email) using design phase of a project professional
Excel sheets and to get feedback , to take developers.
timely decision and actions
accordingly.
