Vanhousing.com is organized by a group of senior University of British Columbia (UBC) students. Advocated by the company's President Tiger Chen, who is a fourth year Economics student, an executive team consisting of four students majoring in Economics, Business Administration and Real Estate was quickly formed.

These four young entrepreneurs started Vanhousing.com in hopes of utilizing their education and real business world experience to create a unique service that will help pioneer the housing rental market. They believe that their solid knowledge base will serve as a strong competitive advantage and will contribute to their business success.

Finding housing accommodations in Vancouver can be a daunting task. Whether you want to find an affordable house, apartment or townhouse to rent, having to sift through traditional methods such as the newspaper can be a very time consuming process due to the limited amount of information and resources available to help one locate available housing accommodations. This especially holds true for the Chinese speaking market within the BC lower mainland area.

With an idea and commitment to create an alternative solution for the Chinese speaking audience within Vancouver and the rest of the BC lower mainland, Tiger Chen and his team wanted to create the first Vancouver housing rental site that would specifically cater to a Chinese audience. The vision was to create a web site that would allow people to post up details about available housing accommodations for people to rent.

In order to help perspective tenants in choosing a place to rent, Tiger also wanted the listings to have other options such as a photo gallery to allow people to view the place in question and to provide some form of online map to aid people in deciding if the area was an ideal place for them to live in. On top of this, offering additional housing related services was also an integral part of the site by incorporating a classified ad system for companies to introduce their services.

We knew from the start that making this web site would require a massive and thorough database management system due to the dynamic nature of the proposed site. With the site targeting a Chinese audience, the web site would also have to be programmed and designed to accommodate Chinese text characters.

With a lot of planning and consultation, it was clear that the site needed a comprehensive content management system to allow the site owners to manage all of its members and house listings with minimal technical knowledge. With a custom programmed content management system, we successfully created a system that automatically stored and processed data from information and files that were provided by registered site members. Aside from also being able to manage house listings, a classified ad management system was also built. To make things even more flexible, the content management system also enabled them to change listing specifications in real time such as adjusting the amount of listings displayed per page instantly.

To satisfy the need of having an online map to display the location of a listing, our team of programmers were able to implement a solution where users could simply enter the address and location of their housing details and upon publishing the information our program would automatically create a Google Maps link of the specified location where users can view an interactive map of the location.

Not to be outdone, our team of designers also played an instrumental role in creating the site. With the business being entirely new, our team of designers had to start from scratch based on the company's preferences. Everything ranging from the logo design to the site look was custom made to help establish the company's corporate identity. To cater to the Chinese audience, we were able to the design the site to display in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters.

With the business primarily being online, targeting Internet users was an important factor in making the site successful. To help accomplish this, both the Simplified and Traditional Chinese pages of the site received our basic search engine optimization services to ensure that it will be recognized and indexed by Chinese search engines.

In the end, Vanhousing.com has been successfully established as Vancouver's first housing rental site that specifically targets the Chinese community.