Cribb
Student housing, finally done right — now live at findyourcribb.com
Impact
Overview
Cribb is a student-focused housing platform built for University of Guelph students, now live and onboarding students and its first landlord partners. It spans seven connected feature domains — rentals, sublets, roommate matching, marketplace, auctions, AI listing comparison, and a Reddit-style campus forum — with verified listings, Cribb Scores, viewing bookings, and real-time messaging tying them together.
Tech Stack
Challenges
- 1Building a housing product that solves trust, comparison, and discovery problems specific to student rentals
- 2Normalizing inconsistent landlord postings into something students can actually compare side by side
- 3Designing separate but connected experiences for students, landlords, writers, and admins
- 4Combining real-time messaging, auctions, booking, AI comparison, and marketplace workflows without fragmenting the UX
- 5Getting from prototype to a public launch real students and landlords would trust with a housing decision
Solutions
- ✓Created the Cribb Score to summarize price, location, amenities, and tenant trust signals on every listing
- ✓Built the AI listing comparison engine on the Anthropic API, turning unstructured postings into structured tradeoff breakdowns
- ✓Designed the data model and WebSocket layer backing auctions, marketplace listings, and community threads
- ✓Built student-first browsing with Mapbox geo-search, saved listings, campus proximity filters, and standardized amenity data
- ✓Integrated Resend and Cloudinary for transactional email and media, and shipped landlord dashboards alongside the student experience
Key Learnings
Designing marketplace trust systems around real user risk
Structuring multi-role product flows without losing focus on the primary student experience
What it actually takes to carry a platform across the line from private build to public launch
Balancing brand, product strategy, and frontend architecture in a live platform
Turning a broad product surface into clear workflows students can actually use