Team LeaseMate featured in Noozhawk

From the Santa Barbara Noozhawk article "UCSB Students Develop LeaseMate Tool to Promote Tenant Literacy" by Caraway, Noozhawk Staff Writer

Five UC Santa Barbara students have developed an AI-powered platform to help tenants understand their rights, manage their leases, submit maintenance requests and connect with their neighbors.

LeaseMate, a free online platform, launched last month and already has nearly 1,000 users.

“The best part is advocating for tenant literacy and helping people know their rights so they don’t get ripped off and they feel more comfortable in their houses,” said Emre Cikisir, a fourth-year computer science major and one of the developers of LeaseMate.

Here’s how it works: Renters create an account and submit a copy of their lease, and then they can ask the AI chatbot questions about pets, move-out or parking without combing through the dozens of pages in their lease to find an answer.

The developers hope to gain 10,000 users in the next few months and partner with local property management companies.

“From a property manager perspective, we feel like when tenants are happier in a house, it will lead to more re-leasing, so it’s not just benefiting tenants,” Cikisir said.

Cikisir said they also worked with the Vista Tenants Union and trained the software to understand tenant rights in California.

Since launching in mid-February, Cikisir said the site has earned hundreds of users and analyzed more than 10,000 lease document pages.

“It benefits everyone, not just Isla Vista, but especially in Isla Vista we have a lot of first-time renters,” said Koray Kondakci, another creator of LeaseMate. “It might be hard to understand some of the stuff in leases — there’s a lot of legal jargon — so we’re trying to make it easier.”

Cikisir, Kondakci, Kole Kikuta, Andrew Thai and Sid Rambhatla developed the project together as part of a computer science class capstone project. Students from the class are paired with mentors from local tech companies. The LeaseMate team worked with Appfolio staff, who suggested they develop something to deal with property management.

Cikisir and Kondakci are roommates and international students from Turkey, and they said they found it difficult to navigate through 50 to 60 pages in their lease.

“We have leases that are super long, and it’s hard to find specific information, so we came up with the idea to make an AI chatbot that answers questions instantly about your lease,” Kondakci said.

The platform also has a virtual handyman feature where tenants can ask how to deal with minor issues such as a leaky sink or spilling red wine on the carpet. Tenants receive step-by-step instructions from the AI chatbot on how to fix the issue or they can submit a maintenance request through LeaseMate that will be sent to their property manager.

“It’s super hard to reach out to property managers because you have to call them in their working hours, and sometimes they don’t respond or send the help you need, so you have to wait and it’s super annoying,” Kondakci said.

The site also has community forums, allowing users to connect and communicate with other renters in their neighborhood.

Thai, another LeaseMate developer, said he hopes the platform makes the rental process easier for first-time tenants.

“I didn’t even know what a lease was until my first year,” Thai said. “If I had a tool that could’ve helped me understand leases, understand how leases work and how property managers do their jobs, it would have helped me mitigate a lot of my mistakes.”

While LeaseMate started as a class project, the developers see it growing, improving the rental experience for tenants and property managers all over the world.

“This was a capstone project that we initially just needed for us to graduate, but it turned out to be something that we genuinely believe in,” Thai said. “We do think that this could be applied to actual property managing software, and we hope that we continue to help tenants.”

Santa Barbara Noozhawk "UCSB Students Develop LeaseMate Tool to Promote Tenant Literacy"