Building: Vesta Property Checker #1

I've decided to start building in public, sharing what I'm doing and the lessons I've learned with others.

After being previously burned by buying property where I wasn't given the complete information on the property, I came up with the idea of Vesta Property Checker. 

Initially, it was a chrome extension with a feature-by-feature checklist that evaluates property listings for completeness and highlights missing critical information via a freeium model.

In doing so, it enhances transparency and assists buyers in making more informed decisions about the biggest risk purchase of their lives.

It then had the option to automate a message to the buying agent asking about all the missing information from the agent.

As well as what was in the listing, I started build my own APIs,  pulling information like crime data for the local area and creating a 'crime score' based on the general population of the area. 

I find other paid APIs that I could utilise to pull in more useful information that wasn't in the listing (think planning applications, noise levels, conservation risk etc). 

I then built a serverless backend that was scalable as it only incurred costs when the user paid for a subscription. 

After showing the MVC to some users, the feedback has been the checklist is overwhelming and I need to reduce cognitive load and create a dashboard scoring the property on a variety of points based on the data. A lot more work, but I think it's going to be a super helpful tool, both valuable for free and also helpful for the paid version. 

Anyway - more to come!

The stack:

- **Chrome Extension Manifest V3:** For accessing the chrome API such as tabs.
- **React:**
- **Tailwind CSS:** A utility-first CSS framework for styling the UI components.
- **React Query** for caching and background updates.
- **Shadcn:** A component library that provides pre-designed UI components to speed up development.
- **Sentry** for error handling.
- **Google Analytics** for reporting on how to improve the extension.

- **AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway:** a serverless backend that is used to:
  - Handle API keys outside of client and providing crime API in free version.
  - Handle transactions securely.
  - Provide multi-device authentication and licensing.
  - Enable premium features (such as enhanced data for property searches).
  - Track and decrement user credits securely.

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