Lease Red-Flag Checker helps students, and anyone else renting a place, check the quality of their lease. The website lets users upload a PDF or text, which the program analyzes and turns into highlighted lines of flagged risk ranging from low to high. When users hover over a highlight, they see suggestions and the relevant law, and the site also drafts an email to their landlord. With links to the Virginia housing codes and student legal services, users can also look directly at their rights
“One of the interesting things I had to deal with was that even though the pasted text or uploaded PDF had the exact wording of the lease, the Gemma model would catch the questionable clauses but sometimes reword them when quoting them back instead of using the exact words. That meant the highlights couldn’t find the text on the page, so I had to add fuzzy matching to locate the original clause.”