LeaseMate

💡 Inspiration

Many young adults — especially students under 25 — don't fully understand rental contracts or their legal rights. Agreements are full of complex legal jargon that's easy to sign without truly understanding. LeaseMate was built to change that: a tool that strips the legalese, flags the risks, and explains exactly what you're agreeing to — in plain English.

🔍 What It Does

Upload your rental contract (PDF or DOCX). Answer 5 quick questions about your situation. LeaseMate extracts the contract text, personalises the analysis to your circumstances, and presents the results as: 📌 Post-it flags — danger, warning, and good news at a glance 📋 Must Know cards — severity-ranked issues with legal citations and action steps 💡 Good to Know — useful context (council tax exemption, quiet enjoyment, etc.) 🔑 Key Terms strip — rent, deposit, duration, notice period pulled instantly

🧠 Challenges

AI hallucination — solved by engineering a ground-truth prompt system anchored entirely to a custom YAML knowledge base of UK housing law (including the upcoming Renters' Rights Act 2025) Messy document extraction — PDFs with complex layouts and tables required careful handling with PyMuPDF Strict JSON output — heavy prompt tuning was needed to prevent the LLM from adding any conversational text that would break the frontend parser

🏆 Accomplishments

Built a legal tool that speaks Gen-Z without dumbing down UK housing law Grounded the AI with a custom YAML covering 33 legal clauses across 11 law sections Connected a full pipeline: 30-page PDF legalese → personalised student context → structured JSON → intuitive visual dashboard Includes the Renters' Rights Act 2025 — legislation most tools haven't caught up with yet

🚀 What's Next

We want to bring LeaseMate to Student Unions so it can help real students with their rental contracts. This is a first prototype — the foundation is solid, and we're confident it can genuinely protect young renters.

👥 Team - Built at HackSussex 2026 by:

• Kazi Abdul Baset
• Leonie Ma
• Muhammad Fachrul Hudallah
• Sadia Malik

• The "TL;DR" Dashboard: It turn 30 pages of boring legal jargon into a wall of easy-to-read sticky notes. Get the bottom line in seconds.
• Personalised Protection: Answer a few quick questions (like if you're an international student or sharing a flat), and it will tailor the legal check exactly to your living situation.
• Bulletproof Accuracy: No AI guesswork. It strictly cross-reference your lease against the latest UK housing laws which were manually compiled by our team of 3 law students into a updatable database to spot hidden fees and illegal clauses before you sign.
• Clear Action Steps: It don't just point out the red flags, rather rank them by severity and tell you exactly what to potentially say to your landlord to protect your deposit.
• Drag, Drop, Done: Just upload your PDF or Word document, and let LeaseMate do the heavy lifting. Free, fast, and no account needed.