Preface

houseav (AV = availability) is a housing marketplace built for a faith community — not a generic Airbnb clone. The goal is simple: help Christians list spare rooms and homes, and help others find a place to stay, inside a network where trust is earned through church affiliation and pastoral references.

I designed and shipped the full stack: a React/Vite SPA on the frontend and a NestJS + PostgreSQL API on the backend, live at houseav.life.

houseav

https://houseav.life/

Traction

What started as a product idea grew into a real community network:

Metric	Value	Notes
Community network	5,000+	People reached across the church network
Platform users	100+	Members who registered on houseav
Trust model	Verified	Pastoral reference + admin review before going live
Languages	5	EN · IT · FR · ES · PT

Product preview

Scrolling the product shows the core loop clearly: discover availability on a map, open a listing, and reach the host through contact channels designed for real-world coordination.

houseav product preview — search, listings, and community housing

houseav homepage visual — room and home availability

The problem

Finding housing inside a church community usually happens in WhatsApp groups, word of mouth, or Facebook posts. That works until it doesn’t:

Posts get lost and can’t be filtered (wifi, parking, dates, roommate prefs)
There’s no shared standard for who is trusted
Hosts have no structured way to publish availability
Admins have no ops view of pending people or listings

houseav turns that informal network into a moderated platform with maps, filters, and verification.

How trust works

This is the product’s differentiator. New members don’t drop into a public feed on day one.

Multi-step signup — profile details plus church affiliation
Pastoral reference letter — pastor/leader confirmation (time in church, baptism, optional guardian)
Pending role — signed in, but gated until review
Admin queue — church-scoped admins verify the person
Listing moderation — hosts publish homes, then listings go through a second review queue before they appear in search

Transactional emails (Mailgun) follow the lifecycle: signup, “house in review”, user verified, house verified, password recovery.

Features

Trusted verification

Pastoral reference letters and admin review queues before members go live.

Church network

Listings stay scoped to a faith community — not a public open market.

Host & seek homes

Publish rooms or homes, search with filters, and manage your own listings.

Map-aware search

Leaflet maps, clustered markers, and a privacy radius around addresses.

Admin operations

Dashboard stats, user queues, and listing moderation for church admins.

Multilingual UI

Product experience in English, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

For hosts

Create a listing with amenities (beds, baths, furnished, parking, wifi), availability windows, roommate preferences, pets/allergies, transport notes, and photos. Addresses are geocoded and stored as map geometry so seekers can discover them spatially.

For seekers

Authenticated search with filters, map markers with clustering, listing detail pages, and host contact via WhatsApp or revealed phone/email — built for real conversations, not an in-app inbox.

For admins

A dashboard with counts, church-scoped registration queues, and listing verification — so the community stays intentional as it scales past informal group chats.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────┐       ┌──────────────────────────┐
│  houseav.frontend   │  API  │  houseav.backend         │
│  React · Vite · RTL │ ────► │  NestJS · TypeORM · JWT  │
│  Leaflet · Firebase │       │  PostgreSQL (+ geometry) │
│  i18next · Redux    │       │  Mailgun · Swagger       │
└─────────────────────┘       └──────────────────────────┘
         │                              │
         │ Docker / Caddy               │ Docker / Railway-ready
         ▼                              ▼
              https://houseav.life/

Frontend highlights

React 19 + Vite + Tailwind CSS
Redux Toolkit (persisted session state)
React Router private routes for the authenticated app
Leaflet / react-leaflet for search maps and address privacy radius (~500m)
Firebase Storage for compressed listing images
i18next across five locales (default cookie locale: Italian)

Backend highlights

NestJS modular API (auth, user, house, church, reference-letter, queues, mailgun, …)
Passport JWT access + refresh tokens with session history
Role guards (admin, super-admin) on verification queues
TypeORM entities for users, houses, churches, map geometry, policies, banners
Rate limiting (stricter on sign-in), Helmet, Swagger docs at /docs
PostgreSQL with geographic Point data for listings

Tech stack

Open source & links

The organization and platform live on GitHub. Frontend and backend are separate repos under the same product umbrella.

houseav on GitHub

https://github.com/houseav

If you’re building community products where trust matters more than growth hacks, houseav is the project I’m most proud of — a full product loop from pastoral verification to map search, shipped end to end.

houseav

A community housing platform that helps Christians share homes safely — 5k community reach, 100 verified users.