This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Community
The Community
Renting a property in Ghana is often stressful, opaque, and financially exploitative.
Informal middlemen (“agents”) frequently:
- Hijack property listings without owner consent
- Inflate rental prices to profit on high commissions.
- Incite / influence property owners to Demand excessive rent advances (sometimes 1–2 years’ rent upfront, although this is illegal)
- Gatekeep properties to create artificial scarcity
This affects:
- Young professionals relocating for work
- Students searching for accommodation
- Low- and middle-income families
- General renting population of Ghana including me (I'm building this system to be used by me and all affected persons in Ghana)
At the same time, property owners also suffer:
- They lose direct contact with potential renters
The result is a rental ecosystem driven by intermediaries instead of transparency.
I believe in information being freely available to those who need it, so I built this free platform E-Agent specifically for the Ghanaian rental community — to restore fairness, direct communication, and price integrity between property owners and renters.
Project goes live to the public soon, but demo is currently available for user testing. link included.
What I Built
I built a free, national real estate platform for Ghanaians (E-Agent) that removes exploitative middlemen and enables direct owner-to-renter interaction.
The system is accessible via a mobile friendly website and will soon support USSD Access since there are lots of areas in Ghana with poor internet connectivity.
Core Model
- Property owners sign up and post listings directly.
- Renters sign up to receive real-time notifications.
- No agent commissions.
- No listing hijacking.
- Renters call up property owners directly, No artificial price inflation.
Key Features
- 🏠 Direct owner-to-renter property listings
- 📲 Real-time SMS alerts for new listings and updates
- 🔐 Secure OTP-based authentication
- 🚫 AI-powered spam and fraud detection (incoming feature)
- 📡 Real-time listing availability tracking
- User based Anti Agent mechanism to prevent agents from using the platform (users can flag listings they deem as fraudulent or posted by agent) Users who exceed or ban activity threshold are automatically blocked.
Demo
🎥 Video demo: (Insert demo link here)
Live Demo link
Code
The project is organized into three separate private GitHub repositories:
- Frontend (AWS Amplify Hosted App)
- Serverless Backend (AWS SAM Infrastructure)
- AI Moderation & Agent System
Dear organizers & judges, due to security and competitive reasons, the repositories are private and links cannot be shared; however, the repos will feature in the accompanying video demo
How I Built It
The platform is built almost entirely on AWS (99% of the stack), designed to scale nationally from day one.
Architecture
Frontend
- AWS Amplify (Hosting + CI/CD)
- Amazon Cognito (User authentication and OTP flows)
Backend
- Amazon API Gateway
- AWS Lambda (business logic)
- Amazon DynamoDB (data storage)
- Amazon S3 (image storage)
- Amazon EventBridge (event-driven workflows)
- Amazon SQS (asynchronous processing)
- AWS Route 53 (DNS)
AI Layer (incoming feature)
- Amazon Nova (AI reasoning)
- Strands Agents running on AWS Bedrock Agentcore
- Automated listing text and image moderation with Amazon Rekognition
- Custom AI tools for safe listing updates
Notifications
- Local Ghanaian SMS gateway for OTPs, alerts, and reminders
The entire system is fully serverless and event-driven.
AI Community Protection Layer (incoming feature)
To prevent the platform from becoming another exploited marketplace, I'm adding an AI-powered enforcement layer that:
- Reviews listing and listing images for inappropriate or deceptive content
- Temporarily suppresses suspicious listings
- Alerts admin with detailed reasoning
Importantly:
- Human oversight and approval will remain in place.
This project aims to remove systemic friction from one of the most essential human needs (housing) and replace it with transparency, fairness, and direct community access.
I @sdg000 am building the entire platform and its components alone. I'm an AWS Cloud Engineer, Solutions / AI Architect from Ghana.
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