"The investments in the Palestinian real estate market represents the majority of the total investments in Palestine, thousands of Palestinians who own estates and want to sell or rent them, use the traditional ways that costs them time and money", this is how Laila Abbasi, Fatima Halabeya, and Zahra Dawood, the graduate students from Al-Quds University expressed the main problem they have discussed to solve during their graduation seminar project.
Laila, Fatima, and Zahra, from the College of Science and Technology at Al-Quds University, Department of Computer Science and Information Technology presented their graduation project on May 19th, 2015 at the Arab Poetry Theatre in the Main campus of Al-Quds University, which was called "Semsar Web Service".
In an interview with the university website, Laila have described that "Semsar Web Service" aimed to shed the lights on the situation of the real estate market in Palestine, she said: " after a deep study, we found that there are several problems we must solve which are; there is no effective and specialized web service that simulates the real estate market in Palestine, secondly, the lack of estates, in addition to their fancy prices in the central cities such as Ramallah, forces the normal citizens who work or live in these cities with low purchasing power that can’t afford such these estates to start searching for other choices that match with their needs and purchasing power, these choices are definitely away from central cites. Searching for other choices in the villages is a hard process and requires spending too much time and money"
Laila, from Jericho, East of the West Bank, added that "we decided to provide help for the Palestinian real estate market by providing a web service that provides the solution for the problems that we mentioned before".
Prof. Imad Abu Kishik, the University president, appreciated their project which is a news idea and will develop the professional work in Palestine, specially that using Semsar does not require money, and reduces the time required to find estates to buy or rent, and Dr. Abu Kishik said that "Al-Quds University will give the graduates full support to achieve their investment".
The graduate student Fatima, from Abu Dis, East Jerusalem, expressed her happiness for presenting her graduation seminar with her friends and explained that "Semsar is a web service, which take the role of the realtor in the real estate market without asking for fees. It also gives the users the chance to get advantage form customer-to-customer trading service, and allows them to interact with each other and make deals".
About the advantages of Semsar, Fatima continued "Semsar provides users multiple ways to find estates based on their needs and purchasing power. One of the ways to search for an estate is by surfing the map (map search method), which provide users a view to all the estates that is located in different regions of Palestine. In addition Semsar provides the ability to rate the estates and comment on them, which gives other users the feedback about the estates.
Zahra, the graduate from Ramallah, North Jerusalem, expressed her honor of herself and her friends who were able to add a great experience to their lives through studying at Al-Quds University, Zahra Said that "in general the economic situation in Palestine is unstable, unpredictable, and always changes, which reflects on one of the important parts of economics which is Real estate market, and through our project we try to minimize the effect of the obstacles on the Palestinian citizens by providing them various choices of estates that probably will satisfy their needs and fit their purchasing power without asking for fees.
The three graduates where so happy when they concluded their presentation saying that "we believe the best results are achieved when we work together. We are good colleagues, we work hard, support each other, value our differences and strive for our mutual success".
