Finding off-campus housing can be overwhelming for Lehigh students as they navigate rising rent, unreliable third-party sites and the hassle of scheduling property visits.
Three engineering students work to streamline this process by linking students and properties on the same platform.
Driven by their own housing troubles, Renzo Medina,‘25, Alexander Docu,‘25, and Simbarashe Mucharemba,‘25, co-founded HawkHousing, an application designed to simplify this search.
“We wanted one single ecosystem for people to find roommates and find a place to live,” Docu said.
The app greets users with a series of questions to gauge social activity and preferences. Then, it matches users with compatible off-campus properties.
Mucharemba said the most important factors taken into account are cost and the desired type of community between roommates, though there’s more to securing a place to live than just those two things.
The brief questionnaire plays a small role in the app’s core goal of fostering community, which Medina said is essential to creating long-term connections.
“There’s a long-lasting relationship that you have to leverage because school is just one place, but then after school, there’s a whole new world to navigate,” Medina said.
The project began in February 2024, when the trio met up in the Health, Science and Technology Building with. There, they brainstormed their ideas and took notes.
“The main thing I remember was (Medina) and (Mucharemba) said, ‘We’re gonna look back at this, and we’re going to remember what we did and that we made something that we can remember our time at Lehigh with,’” Docu said.
The development of the app began over the summer as part of Medina’s fellowship at Lehigh’s Marcon Institute.
It’s not the group’s first time working together and Medina said their effective teamwork has aided the growth of the project.
“I wouldn’t have overcome so many challenges, especially as an international student, if it wasn’t for (Mucharemba and Docu),” Medina said.
As the project advanced, the team decided to expand, bringing Dartmouth students Rodrigo Vega and Alejandro Manrique on board in July.
The app is currently undergoing beta testing and the feedback collected from select cohorts of students during this period will guide the project’s direction.
Mucharemba said the app has already received positive feedback from students.
“We know that they need the product, (and) they want the product, but we want it to be as perfect as it can be,” Mucharemba said. “That’s why we are doing the beta testing, collecting data and looking at the trends.”
Docu said the app doesn’t have a designated date for public access, but they expect to make it available soon. The HawkHousing Instagram account provides a link to a user guide for navigating the app, as well as access to the HawkHousing beta.
Despite the progress made so far, Docu said timing has been one of the greatest challenges of the project, as the team is struggling to decide the best time to release the app.
Mucharemba said fully refining their market and finalizing the beta testing will help the team determine when HawkHousing will be ready for public release.
He said the team has spent so much time perfecting their vision for the app because they see it as something that could be used at other schools.
“We don’t want to just do it and then say that we’re done with it, because we really care about HawkHousing,” Mucharemba said. “It’s our baby.”
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