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A Secured Mobile Cloud-Based House Rental Management System

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 A Secured Mobile Cloud-Based House Rental Management System
Ikuomola A. J. and Asefon M.P.
Department of Mathematical Sciences,
Ondo State University of Science and Technology, Okitipupa, Nigeria.
Corresponding Author:
[email protected], [email protected],

ABSTRACT
Over the years’ house rental agents and landlords have had problems in maintaining their tenants’ records. The
management of tenants’ records and properties has become difficult as a result of data growth, lack of computerized system,
data security, etc. Also, due to population growth and metropolitan migration the manual-based techniques used in keeping
records of tenants are prone to error and lot of time is wasted by the prospective tenant in looking for a house to rent. As a
result of these, a secured cloud-based house rental management system was designed. This system assists prospective
tenants in getting house with ease, help landlord/agent manage tenant’s issues and also facilitate communication between
tenant and landlords/agents. The system was implemented using Ionic, Angular v6, Laravel and MySQL as database, and
was tested with mobile phones and systems installed with the apps. Information about some Tenants, Prospective Tenant,
Landlords/Agents in Lagos State and Ondo State were captured using the mobile devices. The system comprises of the
user and the cloud. The user comprises of prospective tenant, tenant, agent or landlord while the cloud is made up of the
following modules namely: Location Tracking/Google Map View, Alert/notification system, Payment system, Authentication
mechanism, Message exchange Database, Cloud-based, Wallet Engine, Report generation, Chat server, Rental posting
and Search engine. The secured cloud-based mobile rental management system works in real time which gives it more
edge over the manual system. The performance of the system shows that it provides easy way of getting houses by users,
and a secured means of communication between landlord and tenant.

Keywords: Cloud, House, Mobile, Rent, Security,

INTRODUCTION
Property management seeks to advise on the establishment of an appropriate framework
within which to achieve the set out objectives of the property owner and particularly to have
regard to the purpose for which the property is held. It is classified into two fold which are: to
maintain the investments in the property and to maintain the physical aspects of the property
at point of optimum efficiency and economy.
Most houses in Nigeria are owned by individual, thus indicate that housing has a central
importance to quality of life with considerable economic, social, cultural and personal
significance. Though a country’s national prosperity is usually measured in economic terms,
increasing wealth is of diminished value unless all can share its benefits (Erguden, 2001).
Housing plays a huge role in revitalizing economic growth in any country, with shelter being
among key indicators of development. The universal declaration of human rights gives one of
the basic human rights as the right to a decent standard of living, central to which is the
access to adequate housing (United Nations, 1948). Housing as a basic human right demands
that urban dwellers should have access to a decent housing, defined as one that provides a
foundation for rather than being a barrier to good physical and mental health, personal
development and fulfillment of life objectives (Seedhouse, 1986).
Most families choose to rent houses based on their income and family situations;
unfortunately, there may not be enough good quality rental housing for these families.
Millions of people are finding it hard to get accommodation and acquire properties with ease.
This explains why many people have shifted their focus to developing rental houses in Lagos
State and other parts of the country. The demand for house rental management system is now
high. Developing the house rental management system comes with many advantages
especially to the Landlords who are able to increase their profits through rent paid by the

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tenants. Increase in number of tenants makes house rental management difficult especially for
the landlords who are losing huge sum of money through tenants who evade rent payment.
Over the years’ house rental managers and landlords have had problems in maintaining their
tenant and their own records. Tenant may not be able to visit or call the leasing office every
time when an issue arises and at times it will be hard for the tenant to even clearly
communicate the problem. Maintaining a record of issues from tenants is also a tedious
process for the Landlord. The management of client/tenant records and properties have
become difficult as a result of data growth, lack of computerized system, data security, is not
assured and also the manual method of processing the property records is slow and prone to
errors. Also, due to population growth and metropolitan migration the manual-based
techniques used to be replaced by modern computerized applications.
In this work, a secured mobile cloud-based house rental management system which will help
landlord and tenant to overcome the hassles and manage tasks and issues easily in a more
convenient way is designed. The house rental system uses cloud computing technology for
the efficient storage and retrieval of housing records. Since most customer/tenant use mobile
phones now-a-days, an app is developed which makes this process simple by allowing the
tenant to report the problem through the app. The app requires the tenant to fill out the form,
take a picture and send it to the landlord. The landlord will receive the issue in a well-
documented form, which gives landlord a perspective on how to deal with the problem. In
this way, house rental management helps both tenant and landlord to build a better
relationship by resolving issues swiftly.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Nathan et al. (2010) designed a comprehensive UML model of the apartment management
system. The system was desiged for a local building management company wishing to
automate the interactions between tenant, landlord and apartment management staff. The
reporting capabilities modules built into the system were poor and too complex for user to
understand.
Roy et al. (2013) presented an apartment management system which was deployed on the
cloud. The system has a feature of a multi-tenant cloud platform which was developed on a
single app that can cater for various needs of users in the society but the finance/payment
handling mechanism is not integrated into the system.
Gommans et al. (2014) used a waterfall model in building the management system and a
simple architecture in solving the problem but the system is not scalable.
Pshivrac (2015) designed a rental property management app to support both tenant and
landlords by enabling them to document and communicate repair issues, send automatic rent
reminder, package notification and emergency information. Push notification was built into
the system which allows its user to receive notification of updates. The system doesn’t allow
local business to push deals/coupons within a certain geographical area. Adding persons to
the apartment by selecting email id of the registered users was not implemented. It was not
extended to iOS Platform.
Nusrat and Nawshin (2016) implemenedt a constraint satisfaction problem in the search
option of their home rental management system. The rental system has a dynamic value for
searching and also a combination of public transport tracker and dynamic chat server between
admin and agent.
Virupaksha et al. (2016) proposed a web-based hostel student detour management system
which can be apply in any universities. The system helps the hostel warden to manage the

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outing record and information of the student. SMS application programming interface was
integrated.
Junaid et al. (2017) proposed a rental housing management system which possesses all the
features provided by the existing system and improving his own system to work with spatial
database and non-spatial database. In designing the system, he leverages on ASP.NET using
C# and the SQL 2008 database engine. The system allows the user to quickly and easily
search a property for buying and selling but was not information on the property location,
cost range, etc.
Nandhini et al. (2018) proposed and developed a rental home system for nearest place
prediction which enable users to make online payments, remove purchase, display
information about the purchase, make a complaint to the system and submit the tenant
information to system. Although the system is flexibility but the user interface (UI) is poor
and it was not extended to iOS platform.

METHODOLOGY
Design Consideration
In this design, the following are incorporated into the house rental management system.
(i) Location Tracking/ Google Map View: is a web mapping service developed by google
to track location, satellites, real-time traffic conditions, route planning for travelling etc.
This makes all locations in the application to be track down easily (i.e. house location,
tenant address, etc.).
(ii) Alert/Notification system: also known as (mass notification system) or emergency
notification system is integrated so as to reach all user at once without stress.
(iii) Payment system: is included as a means of settling any house financial transaction.
(iv) Authentication mechanism: define the rules about the security information in the
system.
(v) Message exchange Database: allows easy storing and retrieving of information.
(vi) Cloud-based system: enables pooling of various house rent records into large clouds so
as to facilitate ease of record sharing.
(vii)Wallet Engine: enable users (property owners, property manager) reserve/save money
online. The Wallet Engine was integrated because of some extra charges which users
pays on online bank transactions. This engine allows them to manage their money online
without bank charges which is called zero interest online banking scheme.
(viii) Report generation: this feature allows easy generation of all activities done by the
landlord, agent, tenant and admin.
(ix) Chat server: provides a platform where landlord, tenant and agent can communicate
with the technical support team in order to report some issues or to ask for guide in using
the platform.
(x) Rental posting: allows landlord to post his/her property for renting for easy advert
without stress of going through manual process.
(xi) Search engine: allows the users looking for house to search for any house with their
specification without checking/searching all the available houses.

Architecture of a Secured Mobile Cloud-Based House Rental Management System

The architecture of a secured mobile cloud-based house rental management system is
presented in figure 1. The architecture is made up of two components namely; the user and
the cloud. The cloud comprises of the following modules namely: Location Tracking/Google
Map View, Alert/notification system, Payment system, Authentication mechanism, Message
exchange Database, Cloud-based, Wallet Engine, Report generation, Chat server, Rental

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posting and Search engine. The users who can either be the landlord/agent/tenant/prospective
tenant can make use of the iOS/ android smart phone or websites.
The architecture shows how the tenant, agent and landlord access the secured cloud based
house rental management service. Before posting/renting a house; the
landlord/agent/tenant/prospective tenant have to install the application on his/her device and
register on the platform, all users (landlord/agent/tenant/prospective tenant) are authenticated
before accessing the main application. This is done by the authentication server.
For posting of housing ads, the landlord will login into the application and he can now post
any of his/her house for renting, this would be uploaded to the centralized cloud database.
The centralized cloud database system is accessed by the prospective tenant who had
registered, which make them send and retrieve information concurrently on the cloud
alongside with other users like (agent and landlord). The cloud server will accept the request
(such as: searching for houses with a specific features) from the user’s end and returns the
summarized lists of houses with the specification found back to the users, who can then select
any of his/her choice and pay to the owner (landlord or agent) account number directly on the
application after all document have been verified. This is done by the payment engine and
wallet engine built into the system.

Figure 1: Architecture of a Secured Mobile Cloud-Based House Management System.

Component of the Architectural Design

(a) User: uses devices such as android, i-pad, laptop, personal computer etc. to access the
components in the cloud with the help of the App server. The App server redirects the user to
the authentication server. The authentication server authenticates the user and redirects him to
his respective page.

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(b) Cloud: is an efficient technology which tenant, agent and landlord can access, store and
retrieve electronic house data at any time through the use of internet facilities. The cloud
offer pay-as-you-go service because internal data centers and application are delivered as a
service over the internet to the public used making it a Public Cloud. Thus, system software
component in the cloud are the authentication server, house rental management database,
payment engine, google map server, message engine, App server1, App server2, wallet
engine, search engine, chat server and the interface (android app, iOS app and web app).
However, App servers and the backend server (authentication server) encrypt and decrypt
information using token of over 100 length strings which make it difficult to decrypt by any
intruder during updating, editing and monitoring of the system. The Cloud consists of the
following components:
(i) App server: This part of the cloud provides a common platform for all the house
management systems. It provides an interface for various devices that masks the
heterogeneity of all collaborating with different users. It facilitates the communication
between the authentication server and the user directly. It recognizes any devices on the
platform and communicates with them accordingly, without any problem in change of
device.
(ii) Payment Engine: it provides a payment platform where by the tenant can pay directly
into the agent or landlord account.
(iii) Wallet Engine: provides an alternative method in place of payment system with cards.
For every successfully registered users, a unique wallet ID is generated for everyone.
This wallet ID allows easy flow of transaction. For example, tenant can pay into the
agent or landlord’s wallet ID from his own wallet ID. The user can refill his wallet ID, if
it is empty by just entering his bank details and then the amount to be refill. This was
integrated into the design so as to avoid the problems of network from the bank, bank
charges etc.
(iv) Chat server: Online chat server provides a kind of communication over the Internet that
offers a real-time transmission of text messages from tenant, agent and landlord to the
technical support team of this application and vice versa. The Chat messages are
generally short in order to enable technical support team to respond quickly.
(v) Message Engine: provides a common platform for all the house management systems
users (tenants, agent and landlord). It allows easy distribution of information that is, it
allows the landlord/agent to reach all his/her tenant at once.
(iv) Authentication Server: is the part of the system that handles authentication and
authorization. It verifies if an entity using the system has the right to perform the
intended action such as updating, retrieving, transferring, etc, on the house information
provided. The authentication server grants access to authorized users and denies
unauthorized users access to records or resources on the system. This is achieved through
the generation of usernames and passwords for tenants, agents, landlords and
administrators of the application. Any member of the admin is expected to log in to the
system with their username and password. The system compares the username and
password with those in the local database and grants access to the user if they match,
otherwise, the user is denied access. The flowchart of the user’s (tenant, agent, landlord)
authentication phase is shown in figure 2.

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 Figure 2: Flowchart of the user’s (tenant, agent, landlord) authentication phase

(iv) Centralize Database

The centralized database (CDB) is a database that is located, stored and maintained in a
single location. The CDB is located in the cloud presented in the architecture usually a central
computer or a database system. There is an interaction between authentication server
(backend) and the CDB in the cloud, this is because tenants, agents and landlords’ data from

6
different houses are stored in the centralized database. This enable all information to be
stored efficiently and made available anytime required.
The proposed system uses MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS) and
the database holds its important data with their specifications.. The screenshot of the database
is shown in figure 3.

Figure 3: Screenshot of the Database

IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS

Implementation
The programming language used are Javascript (AngularJs, Ionic) and PHP (laravel) with
SQL server database. The reasons for choosing AngularJs, Ionic and Laravel as a
programming language for the implementation are: AngularJS and Ionic are implementation
of Javascript while laravel is an implementation of php.
Angular: Angular Framework programming language was designed by Google for building a
variety of applications that run on the Javascript. The Angular Framework possess class
library of Javascript which provides access to many services and other restful application
programming interface (API). The classes are well-designed classes that speed up the
development cycle significantly. The Angular Framework helps to develop a Single-Page
Applications( SPA ) which perform all its functionalities, templating and user requests on a
single page without reloading or redirecting to any other pages. This platform functionality
enable any application built on it to be scalable (it can handle millions of users without
crashing).
Laravel: perform authentication based on the server (www.laravel.com). It performs the
authentication in the application. Using laravel as the server-side, authentication based server
will improve the security of the system and allow the application to be of world class
standard.

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Ionic: was used as an HTML5 mobile application development framework in building hybrid
mobile application. The Ionic applications are essential apps which work perfectly as a native
application. Ionic was used to design the application for smart phones users (Android phones,
Windows phones and IOS phones). The ionic framework gives you an opportunity to build an
hybrid app and spread it across all major platforms such as Android, IOS, windows or any
other mobile operating system. When you launch a hybrid application across several
platforms, the application automatically changes as per the mobile operating system to
maintain the native feel.

Results
The front-end user interface of A Secured mobile cloud-based House Rental Management
System is a graphical representation of the design. The graphical user interface components
are used to provide good navigation and easy access to frequently used data. The home
window has six (6) buttons namely; Administrator Session, Tenant Session, Landlord/Agent,
About Session, Blog Session and Contact Us. The splash screen allows login and signup for
users.
The SignUp Graphical User Interface for iOS and android apps are shown in figure 4 (a & b),
where the user fill in the necessary information about himself. At the point of choosing the
nationality/state of the landlord/agent or the tenant during sign up, a pop up dialog is
displayed as shown in figure 5.

(a) iOS app (b) Android app

Figure 4: The Sign Up Graphical User Interface for iOS and android apps

Figure 5: The Sign-up Graphical User Interface showing select state option for users

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Figure 6 shows the email error notification as a toast message. If the email address is not
properly written, an error notification message is display at the bottom of the screen.

Figure 6: Email Error notification

Clicking on login button in figure 6 above, a dialog Notification box is displayed as shown in
figure 7, where the user can provide his username and password. If this information is correct,
the user is granted access and a notification box showing “login successful” is display as
shown in figure 8 and then display the menu bar as shown in figure 9 else the user is denied
access.

Figure 7: The Login

Figure 8: Login Successful Notification

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 Figure 9: The Menu Bar

Figure 10 shows the Home page where the lists of houses for Prospective Tenant are display.
If any house on the page is click on, details about the house will be displayed in a new page
as shown in figure 11. While figure 12 display the Check Out page.

Figure 10: The Home Page

Figure 11: The House Details

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 Figure 12: The Check-Out Page
Figure 13 shows the compose message page where messages can be written and send. When
the SEND button is click after composing the message, the “Message sent” dialog box is
displayed as shown in figure 14.

Figure 13: The compose message page

Figure 14: The message sent dialog

Figure 15 to 33 shows the pages for website users. Figure 15 shows the sign-in page for the
user, once the information provided in this page that is the email address and password are

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correct and the login button is click the “create account” page is displayed as shown in figure
16. This page allows the use to create an account and also agree to the terms and condition of
that site.

Figure 15: The Login Page for Website Users

Figure 24: The Register Page

The page where Prospective Tenant can easily check any houses available within their
budget is shown in figure 17. This page displayed the area where the house is located,
the types of house and the price allocated to the rent.

Figure 17: The Home Page

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The picture of available apartment and the location is shown in figure 18 while figure 19
displayed details about a particular apartment/house and a means of booking for the house.

Figure 18: List of Houses and Location

Figure 19: House Details

The House Renting Form page for the selected House is shown in figure 20. This form
contains information about the selected house in terms of address, area, size of the house,
floor, room capacity, etc. and a request booking part where the prospective tenant enters
information about his email, family member, message, etc.
The house renting form and the contact us page is shown in figures 21 and 22 respectively.

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 Figure 20: House Renting Form

(a)

(b)
Figure 21 (a & b): The contact us page

If a landlord/agent login in figure 15, the dashboard page is display as shown in figure 22.
The dashboard shows the profile of the landlord/agent, compose messages, rented house(s)
and changing of password. Figure 23 shows the message page that is the messages send
between the agent/landlord and tenant(s) while figure 24 shows the password changing page.

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 Figure 22: The dashboard for landlord and agent

Figure 23: Message Page between landlord/Agent and tenant

Figure24: Changing Password

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 Discussion
This work aimed at developing a Secured Mobile Cloud-based House Rent Management
System for landlord/agent/tenant/prospective tenant. The work is expected to overcome the
problems faced by users with the current system used. The expected outcomes of
using the developed cloud based house rent management system include:
(i) The system enables accurate registration of landlord/agent/tenant/prospective tenant
(ii) It facilitates authentication, so as to ensure that only authorized users gain access to
services
(iii) It provides functions and features such as validation and user friendliness
(iv) It provides a mobile rental system enabled by the cloud.
(iv) The system provides seamless communication between tenant/prospective and
landlord/agent
(v) The system can be use using iOS/ android smart phone or websites

CONCLUSION
In this work, a secured mobile cloud-based house rental management system is designed.
The system provides landlord/agent/tenant/prospective tenant with information on house
records. These records can be share with other users like making an advertisement for an
apartment that is available. It also provides a payment system and wallet engine which allows
easy means of making transaction.
For the web application, Angular 6 platform was used to develop the graphical user interface
(GUI) while Laravel was used for the back-end which handles the SQL server used in hosting
the database locally and later stored the encrypted summarized house record in the cloud. The
system was designed to work in most operating environments including Windows, iOS and
Linux.
In future, the system can be improved upon using an embedded system that is if the Tenant is
not having a device to communicate with the landlord/agent, the landlord/agent can still
communicate with the device integrated into the house door (Smart doors). The software will
be connected to a smart door which will not allow the user/tenant to access his/her room
unless he/she renews the house rent agreement. A new feature like count down to the time the
house rent of the tenant will expire will be implemented.

REFERENCE

Erguden S., (2001), Low-Cost Housing: Policies and Constraints in Developing Countries
International Conference on Spatial Information for Sustainable Development
Nairobi, Kenya 2–5.
Gommans, H.P., Njiru, G. M. and Owange, A. N. (2014), Rental House Management System.
International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 4(11).
Junaid A. K., Aasif Y. and Shahid M. B. (2017), Rental Housing Management System.
International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing.
Nandhini R., Mounika k., Muthu S., Suganthi S. (2018). Rental Home System for Nearest
Place Prediction. International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics 119(10),
1677-1686.
Nathan V., Fangwu W., David F. and Andrew M. (2010), Apartment Management System
Analysis and Design Information Systems Analysis and Design Spring Quarter 2010.
Nusrat M. and Nawshin T. (2016), Home Rental System Implementing Constraint
Satisfaction problem. Thesis, Department of Computer Science and engineering,
BRAC University.

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 Pshivrac R. (2015). Rental Property Management System. International Journal of
Scientific & Engineering Research, 4( 5), May-2015.
Ray A., Kulkarni A., Gangakhedkar A., and Amdecar M. (2013), Cloud Based Apartment
Management System. International Journal of Scientific and engineering Research.
4(5).
Seedhouse D, (1986), Foundation for Health Achievement, Health Policy, 7(3).
Virupaksha G., Shalini B. R., Sowmya L. K., Zeenath and Ghaleppa. (2016), Apartment
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