The problem Trusted Properties Decentralized Marketplace (TPM) solves

Most of the current online property rental portals provide just online listings with limited information with some pictures/videos, search options and other minor features.

Lack of a single trusted source of the critical information is the main problem in todays rental process. As such there is a lot wasted time and efforts in scheduling property visits, making enquiries from different sources before making offers.

TPM will buld a blockchain stack using Solana to track the transactions across the stakeholders and as the TPM customer base grows it will be able to offer ratings about the stakeholders.

Property Owners/Property Managers have no verifiable track record of tennants in terms of past rental payment history, TPM will be able to provide tennant ratings to the owners based on the data available with TPM based on past tenancy.

Prospectice Tennants would like to know about the handling of the property management/Owners, Maintence Service History track record of maintenance service providers, neighorhood safety etc. TPM will be able to provide pros

There is no transparency about the price points, no verifiable rental price history of the property and the nearby areas. TPM will help improve rental Price and Terms Discovery using the transparent yet private online bidding and negotiation process,

Rental lockin and Deposit is another source of contention between Property owners/tenants. TPM will let exisiting renters list the rented property back in the market place to help it be re-rented and automatically transfer the right to use of the property

There are a lot of manual process Rental application process, Contract execution, Rent collection etc, TPM will automate this using Web2 and Solana blockchain.

Challenges we ran into

With No background on Solana/Rust and a part time team it was really a steep learning curve for all of us.

• We started with solana-program & @solana/web3.js
• First, we started building an NFT to represent the access to the rented property but due to lack of time, focused on the contract and rent payment parts first.
• Documentation and sample projects didn't help much due to limited time. Most examples use Tokens, we just wanted to transfer lamports to a PDA.
• Managing state with our custom state data (like, account public-keys), it's (de)serialization & size calculation was also challenging as we were new to Rust. Eventually we experimented and figured things out.
• Faced various issues in creating transactions with multiple accounts from web3 to solana
• Finally experimented with @project-serum/anchor and rewrote the whole project using it.
• There was a bug with installing anchor v0.13 (with a submodule

  examples/cfo/deps/stake

  ) that was eventually fixed in anchor v0.14
• Faced similar challenges with Anchor. The documentation is too basic and most examples use custom Tokens for transfer or payment.
• Again, we figured things out by experimentation.
• There was an issue in logging with solana-test-validator as well. Just exporting RUST_LOG on cli did not help. Finally, resolved by permanently adding to the ~/.bashrc file.

We ran out of time :) ..This project was started just two weeks back and still a work in progress.. We want to be able to make NFT / Token for Right to Use and make these tokens tradable in the market place so that rental properties right to use can be traded with just a few clicks

We really aspire and are determined to build an end to end product to meet our stated goal of making rental process as easy as buying a product on Amazon. Solana with its web scale speed and low transaction fee becomes a valuable tool for us to achieve our goal. We will continue and take this project to completion.