Mini Case: Lodging Finder

Lodging Finder (LF) is to be designed as an online service that lets people find their accommodations or lodgings and let the owners rent out their property or rooms, all within the city Sydney and its suburb areas. The database is to be designed to fully support this online service.

Accommodation Types: There are two main types of accommodations or lodgings. The terms accommodation and lodging are interchangeable in this assignment. The first type consists of accommodations that are directly managed by the property owners, and these accommodations can be in the form of a separate house or apartment, or just one or more rooms for share in a house or apartment. The second type is the same as the first type except that the secondary owner who rented the whole property himself is now re-renting out the whole place or some of the rooms himself. We will categorically refer the first type as the primary lodgings and the second type as the secondary lodgings.

Client Types: Anyone who is looking for an accommodation through LF is a client. Although there is no strict limitation on who the clients should be, landlords however tend to view the clients in terms of whether or not they are students (international or domestic, undergraduate or postgraduate), working professionals, or families, and so on.

Client Request: A client request for an accommodation typically specifies, among others, the start date and the initial duration, the type of lodging, desirable suburbs, and the date of the request. A lodging request may cover several suburbs, and several lodging requests may be mutually exclusive in that, if one of these requests is fulfilled then the others are no longer needed. This may apply to the situation in which a client seeks accommodations of different types on different suburbs etc, but can only take one offer anyway.

Lodgings: For the primary lodgings, any client can get the corresponding contact details for free. Once a client has made a contract for a lodging found via LF, the owner will be liable to pay FL 5% of the first week's rental. The database will record such successful rental agreements by allowing either the client or the owner (or both) to notify such an agreement. For the secondary lodgings, a client must pay a specific amount of credit points in order to obtain the contact details of such a lodging. This amount is currently fixed, but with a view to vary somewhat in future. Clients may purchase such credit points online via PayPal. All credit points have the life expectancy of 12 months, but this is not required for the current database design.

Searching: Once a request for a lodging is formulated online, a client can immediately search the system for the matched accommodations, or leave the request on the system and wait for a potential accommodation owners to show their interest to the client. If a secondary owner comes across this request and thinks he may have something to offer, he can either just notify the client of the suitable lodging he has, or go further and send the contact details to the client. In the former, the client can proceed in the usual way; in the latter, the secondary owner will have to pay the equal amount of credit points the client would normally have to pay in order to fetch the contact details. If a primary lodging owner comes across a request, he can also notify the client of the pertinent lodging as well as the contact details for free.

Inspections: LF will be managed by several staff members. Some staff may also selectively inspect some of the rental properties and rate them in terms of 1-5 stars. The inspection date and result will also sit along with the accommodation advertisement on the LF site.

Authentications: To use the LF system, both owners and clients must register a username and password for themselves. After the registration and login, the owners can themselves create their lodging entries to be advertised, and the clients can create their request entries for the accommodations. For simplicity, such authentications are currently not required for the database design.