Initial situation
Under the Rent Index Reform Act of 10.08.2021, municipalities with a population of 50,000 or more are obliged to prepare a rent index by 01.01.2024. This also applies to the state capital Magdeburg.
The rent index is intended to increase transparency on the housing market and reduce legal disputes between tenants and landlords by disclosing local comparative rents.
Under the direction of the Office for Statistics, Elections and Digitization, the state capital of Magdeburg has created a qualified rent index that is prepared in accordance with recognized scientific principles and recognized both by the authority responsible under state law (city council) and by representatives of landlords' and tenants' interests (Section 558d (1) sentence 1 BGB).
Goal
As an additional service for its citizens, the city of Magdeburg would like to offer an online rent comparison calculator. Citizens will be able to use this to conveniently determine the local comparative rent for their apartment online using a questionnaire on the relevant apartment features - without having to use their own calculator, paper and pencil and without having to laboriously search for the relevant information in page-long tables (see excerpt below), as was previously the case.
Solution
The state capital of Magdeburg is relying on the knowledge and experience of eoda for the development of the online rent index calculator. Based on a prototype application from the state capital of Magdeburg, the experts at eoda developed a concept for the online rent index calculator. The main focus here was on identifying additional functionalities that could provide citizens with tangible added value - such as downloading the results in the form of a PDF.
Based on this concept and in close consultation with the state capital of Magdeburg, eoda developed the online rent index calculator and trained the customer's contact persons in its use.
Technically, the online rental calculator is based on the R package Shiny. Shiny applications stand for user-friendliness and flexibility - in use and in development. In addition to the recognized advantages, Shiny was also the preferred solution because the employees of the Office for Statistics, Elections and Digitization also rely on the open source programming language R in their daily work.
The special feature of the solution developed by eoda is the combination of the Shiny app and a YAML file. The Shiny app is the framework and when the application is started, the content information and settings are loaded from the YAML file. YAML is a user-friendly data format language that is readable and easy to write. It is often used - as in this case - for configuration files.
This structure makes the application very flexible and easy to maintain. The employees of the state capital of Magdeburg are thus able to adapt the content in the YAML file independently without having to access the application's programming code. The existing application can also be easily used in a different context, which further increases its sustainability for the state capital of Magdeburg.
Result
With the online rent comparison calculator, the state capital of Magdeburg is offering an additional digital service. This enables citizens to determine the local comparative rent for their apartment much more quickly and easily than before.
The collaboration with eoda has provided the state capital of Magdeburg with an intuitive and reliable application that offers great technical flexibility - from simple customization to use in other fields of application.
You can find the online rent index calculator of the state capital Magdeburg here.
In addition to the development of the online rent index calculator, eoda has also supported the state capital of Magdeburg in the area of knowledge transfer with workshops, pair programming sessions and code reviews to independently develop successful Shiny applications for productive operation.
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We look forward to exchanging ideas with you.
Your expert on Data-Science-Projects:
Lutz Mastmayer
projects@eoda.de
Tel. +49 561 87948-370
