Akademisk Kvart

The project

Akademisk Kvart is a non-profit housing platform run by the Stockholm Federation of Student Unions (SSCO). It helps students find fairly priced housing in one of Europe's tightest rental markets. In February 2026 I joined its new four-person IT group as a developer, and we ran the platform until we handed it over to the next team in June.

What I built

• Built automatic translation of listings between Swedish and English with Google Cloud Translation, so international students can read every ad. A listing averages about 600 characters, so translating one costs around a cent.
• Built the new ad-posting form from a Figma design: step by step, with a progress bar and autosave, so a landlord who closes the tab by mistake loses nothing. Making it work smoothly on every screen size was the hardest part.
• Worked in the live codebase with UX designers and developers, using Git merge requests and separate staging and production deployments on Vercel.

What our team shipped in one term

• A report system that lets students flag misleading listings or bad treatment by a landlord, anonymously if they want to.
• Address autofill with the Mapbox API, which also keeps listings inside the Stockholm area.
• A feedback flow that asks students and landlords whether a home was found through the platform, and a newsletter that sends the ten newest listings.
• A faster, mobile-first landing page, rebuilt information pages, and mobile-friendly email templates.
• Logging on every backend service, a maintenance page for planned downtime, and documentation that covers the whole application for the next team.

Who uses it

Monthly user statistics, exported from AWS Cognito without personal data, showed about 5,000 users by May 2026: 80% students and 20% landlords. Of the students who named their university, 30% came from Stockholm University and 25% from KTH.

Stack