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Summer Housing: Housing has a large impact on all aspects of life as young professionals. Where you find a place to stay determines your ease of commuting to work, what resources are available to you on a day-to-day basis, and how you experience your time in the location that you are working in. As students figure out their goals for the summer, in terms of internships or research positions, they must also figure out logistics for living in those areas. Housing during the year is largely organized by the university, greek life, or independent living communities, with a marginal number of undergraduates choosing to live in apartment housing in Boston or Cambridge. Over the summer, however, the scramble for housing is significantly more murky, and is not limited to places within the greater Boston area.
Each summer, MIT students encounter significant obstacles when trying to secure housing for internships, research positions, or on-campus work opportunities in the Boston area. While there are many potential housing options — including MIT-owned dorms, Greek housing, local apartments, and sublets — these opportunities are scattered across numerous uncoordinated sources. Students often find themselves searching through fragmented platforms, social media posts, and word-of-mouth networks to locate a place to live. This lack of a centralized housing resource leads to widespread frustration and inequality, creating barriers for both students and housing providers. For students, the current system is both time-consuming and unreliable. Without a single, organized platform, they must piece together information from multiple sources or depend on personal connections, often resorting to “friends of friends” to find an available sublet. This lack of transparency and accessibility forces students to make housing decisions with incomplete information. As a result, many end up settling for low-quality or even unsafe housing when options seem scarce. Others face financial strain when they are unaware of more affordable or subsidized opportunities offered through MIT or other local providers. Moreover, students who relocate to new cities for internships often struggle to find trustworthy roommates, which increases living expenses and can lead to isolation or discomfort during the summer months.
The problem extends to housing providers as well. MIT departments, landlords, and Greek organizations that are willing to offer housing to students frequently struggle to connect with the right audience. Without a clear channel to advertise available rooms, these providers face unnecessary vacancies, while students remain unaware of legitimate and potentially ideal housing options. The disorganization of the current housing ecosystem results in inefficiency and missed opportunities for both sides.
Our app seeks to eliminate these barriers by creating a centralized, transparent platform that connects MIT students with verified summer housing options. It will allow students to browse all available listings in one place and filter them based on criteria such as price, location, safety, and amenities. At the same time, housing providers will gain a direct line of communication with interested MIT students, improving occupancy rates and streamlining the housing process. Beyond Boston, the app will also help students interning or conducting research in other cities find compatible MIT roommates, enabling them to share costs and live more comfortably. Ultimately, our goal is to make summer housing more accessible, affordable, and safe while strengthening the MIT community through shared living experiences.
- Reddit: Finding housing for summer internship: Subreddit for engineering students has numerous posts (including this one) about advice for how to find housing, showing that finding housing for the summer for college students is a struggle. Quotes from this thread highlight both the difficulty of finding housing for short-term (internship-length) stays and the fragmented workarounds (Airbnb, asking local interns, etc.)
- Reddit: summer housing in Boston: Reddit thread specific to finding housing in Boston. Comments note many different avenues to finding housing, showing that the current best strategy for housing includes using many different methods, which is very fragmented.
- High-rents make finding summer housing for summer a struggle: This article highlights how college students struggle to secure affordable summer housing amid soaring rents and limited short-term lease options, often facing landlords unwilling to rent for internship-length stays. It underscores the frustration, financial strain, and scarcity of flexible housing that students can realistically afford. College Confidential: Summer housing in boston: A thread on summer housing in Boston shows how limited and expensive short-term options near universities like MIT can be, with one parent noting their child even turned down an internship due to the lack of affordable housing. It underscores how competitive and costly finding temporary student housing is in Boston.
- Struggling to secure summer housing: This article highlights how students often struggle to find short-term housing during summer internships, facing limited listings, strict lease terms, and logistical challenges even when they can afford rent. It shows that beyond cost, the main difficulty lies in connecting with reliable, student-friendly housing options, emphasizing the need for a better platform to match students with short-term rentals.
- Dormspam: MIT students currently use Dormspam to share sublet and summer housing opportunities. The large volume of emails (see subset in folder) shows strong demand for communication, but Dormspam is fragmented (each post is a separate email) and requires students to sift through cluttered inboxes to find relevant information for housing.
- Boston Housing Facebook Group The Boston Housing Facebook group serves as a broad marketplace where anyone can post or search for rooms, apartments, and sublets in the area. However, it’s not student-specific as most listings are long-term, unverified, and mixed with unrelated posts, making it difficult for students to find short-term, reliable options. The lack of filtering and prevalence of scams further complicate the search for summer or internship housing.
- Cornlet Cornlet is a Cornell-specific housing platform where students can post and find sublets near campus, offering a more focused alternative to general housing sites. However, it’s limited to the Cornell community, lacks robust filtering for short-term, internship-length stays, and doesn’t include roommate-matching features. It serves as a strong comparable for what a similar platform could achieve for MIT and the broader Boston student community.
- Ohana Ohana is a platform for short-term, furnished rentals in cities like Boston, offering flexible move-in dates and lease durations suited to temporary stays. However, it isn’t student-specific, with limited listings for internship-length housing and occasional concerns about sublet permissions and fees. It highlights demand for a more student-focused, trusted platform tailored to short-term housing and roommate matching.
- SpareRoom SpareRoom is a major platform for finding rooms, sublets, and roommates in Boston — featuring thousands of listings and enabling users to post either a room or a “room wanted” ad. However, for students seeking short-term housing, it has some drawbacks: many listings are for long-term leases, filtering by internship‐length stays is weak, and the sheer volume of general listings can make it hard for students to quickly find peer-friendly, short-term matches.
- airbnb Airbnb offers flexible short-term rentals but is primarily geared toward tourists rather than students, making internship-length stays expensive and difficult to secure. Listings are often priced above student budgets, with limited options for multi-week leases. Its focus on vacation rentals also reduces the supply of affordable long-term housing in cities like Boston, worsening student housing challenges.
Housing providers - including MIT students, Greek organizations, landlords, or departments — can post available summer housing opportunities directly to the platform. Listings will include key details such as dates of availability, room type, price, amenities, address, and additional notes. This feature ensures that listings are visible to the right audience — MIT students — rather than getting lost in public listing sites or group chats. By giving providers a centralized and trusted space to advertise, this feature increases the likelihood that their rooms will be filled efficiently while providing students with accurate, verified information.
Students will be able to browse and filter all available housing options in one organized location. They can search based on factors such as location, price, dates, and type of housing (MIT dorm, sublet, apartment, etc.). This streamlines what is currently a fragmented and stressful process, eliminating the need to search through multiple platforms or rely on informal networks. By consolidating all listings in one place, this feature promotes accessibility, transparency, and better decision-making for students seeking affordable and safe summer housing.
For students interning or conducting research outside the Boston area, the platform will offer a roommate-matching feature. Users can create short profiles describing their internship location, budget, and housing preferences, allowing them to connect with other MIT students living in the same city. This feature helps students share housing costs, find compatible roommates, and maintain a sense of community even while away from campus. It directly addresses the challenges of affordability, safety, and social isolation that arise when students must live alone or with strangers.
To ensure safety and authenticity, all users — both listers and seekers — will log in using their official MIT credentials. This verification system guarantees that only members of the MIT community can create listings or view housing posts. By restricting access to verified MIT affiliates, this feature minimizes the risk of scams, maintains trust within the platform, and reassures users that their interactions are secure and legitimate.
A potential expansion of this app would allow for its use on campus outside the MIT ecosystem. This would help college students from across universities to find housing in unfamiliar cities, and build relationships across institutions. In order to do this safely, while still respecting the Single Sign-On feature, we would require a feature that can conveniently submit a request for an accredited university to join the housing program. Universities with a high volume of requests can coordinate with the app separately to implement their single sign on program without our application.
As part of the listing of recommended housing locations, we may include a port view of the displayed housing results, in relation to the city view, or in relation to any other starred locations, such as workplace or gyms. This visual map can integrate several of the other features listed, such as displaying public transportation routes, or listing any tags that may be associated with the property. An important consideration to keep in mind here would be security, as the exact location of available units would likely be sensitive information, especially since the demographics of the future renters would be approximated. This could be avoided by indicating each unit as a general / block location, as opposed to exact street addresses.
Since a main goal of our users will likely be convenience to the workplace, a primary feature can be to save the workplace location information, and display the approximate distance and travel time to the workplace from any given available apartment and during any approximate time of the day. The time would need to be a rough estimate, but it could be incredibly beneficial to our users, as this is one less item they would need to calculate themselves. A preferred mode of transportation could be included when completing these calculations to keep everything in scale.
Many factors go into choosing housing. We have already discussed the importance of distance from the workplace, but a second and arguably just as important consideration is the distance from other aspects of city life. This includes, but is not limited to public transit (metro lines, blue bikes, etc.), groceries and restaurants, gyms, parks, and more. Integrated with the visual map or with the search results themselves we could include tags that indicate level of access to these secondary amenities that greatly increase quality of life, which the user can decide the importance of in their decision making.
As we would like to encourage positive living conditions for our users, students will be able to leave simple, star-based reviews denoting a handful of factors, such as quality of amenities, landlord, area, and more. Better-reviewed locations will be higher recommended to the next user.
Our primary values are safety, community, and universal accessibility. To ensure user safety, we can require valid university emails from students and background checks or an application from providers. To enhance community bonds, we could implement a chat feature for students and providers to communicate throughout the leasing process, and for students to talk with their roommates. Finally, our app can provide universal accessibility to housing information through a clear UI and page translations.
The direct stakeholders of our app are the students, whose primary concerns are their best housing options and where other MIT students are staying; and housing providers, whose primary concerns are leasing their rooms to students who will be good guests. Thus, we could add an analytics feature for both parties to see what housing students are most interested in, and we could implement an additional rating system for providers to leave reviews on students.
Our indirect stakeholders include housing providers that aren’t part of the system, who may suffer to fill their availability; students looking for housing that aren’t app users, who may find space to be limited; and other current building residents, who may see an increased presence of students renting. In response, we could create a rewards-based referral feature to increase app usage, and a tag system for users to match their living preferences with their housing.
Our tagging feature includes transportation categories such as distance to the nearest T and Blue Bike stations, which are specific to Boston-area universities. However, these tags wouldn’t be relevant if our app were to be adopted at other geographically diverse, such as smaller or more rural, campuses. Thus, we could allow providers to customize tags depending on the significant housing features of their specific campuses, such as parking availability.
Our app relies on providers entering their housing availability, but they may refuse for reasons including prior app partnerships or personal preferences. As a design response, we could include a page in our app with a comprehensive list of other websites for users to browse in addition to our own housing options.