BorderPass
Designing a trusted housing marketplace for international students
Borderpass helps international students strengthen their Canadian study visa applications with AI-assisted guidance. Through partnerships with colleges and universities, it had already become a trusted part of the journey to studying in Canada.
Housing was a natural extension. Students often need to find a place to live before arriving, when it’s difficult to verify listings, meet landlords, or find roommates.
As lead designer, I worked with product and engineering to design a marketplace connecting verified students with verified landlords, while making it easier to find roommates and secure a lease remotely.
Focus
Marketplace experience, onboarding flows, roommate matching, listing design, lease workflow
Stage
Growth stage product expansion
Role
Lead Product Designer
Collaborators
Product management, engineering, partner institutions
Product Tension
Finding housing from another country is high risk
Most housing marketplaces assume renters can visit a property, meet a landlord, and understand the neighbourhood before committing.
International students often have to make the same decision from thousands of kilometres away. That creates several challenges:
verifying that listings and landlords are legitimate
understanding unfamiliar neighbourhoods
comparing inconsistent listing information
finding roommates without a local network
Students were making a significant financial decision with limited information and few ways to establish trust.
Product Insight
Borderpass already had the trust layer
Borderpass had an advantage traditional housing marketplaces didn’t: it already knew who its students were.
Students were verified through the visa process, while partnerships with colleges and universities gave Borderpass an established role in their journey to Canada.
Rather than building another open marketplace, we saw an opportunity for Borderpass to sit between students and landlords, verifying both sides of the transaction.
Product architecture diagram
Key Experience Design
Designing the Marketplace
The marketplace needed to work for three groups with different needs:
Actor
Students
Landlords
Borderpass
Need
Reliable housing and compatible roommate
Consistent, verified tenants
Trusted marketplace that supports student success
This led to three core experiences:
Discover — find verified housing
Group — find roommates and make decisions together
Lease — move from interest to a signed agreement
Key Experience Design
Making remote housing search more reliable
Listings were structured around consistent information rather than leaving quality up to individual landlords.
Students could compare property details, amenities, photos, neighbourhood context, and estimated commute times to nearby campuses.
We also added stronger trust signals, including verified landlord identities, signed OREA agreements confirming listings were legitimate, and reviews from other students.
The goal was simple: give students enough reliable information to make a housing decision without being there in person.
Key Experience Design
Helping students find roommates
For many students, finding roommates was part of finding housing. But students arriving from abroad often hadn't met their classmates or built a local network yet.
We introduced roommate matching to help students find people with compatible budgets, lifestyles, schedules, and neighbourhood preferences.
The platform used these preferences to generate a compatibility score, giving students a starting point for deciding who they might want to live with.
Key Experience Design
Designing for how groups actually make decisions
Our early concepts included a voting system where roommate groups could formally vote on properties.
Research showed that people didn't really want that much structure. Groups preferred to talk through their options and arrive at a decision more naturally.
We replaced voting with shared chat, giving roommates a simpler place to discuss listings and coordinate decisions.
It was a useful reminder that adding structure doesn't always make a complex decision easier.
Key Experience Design
A clearer path to a signed lease
Once a group found a property, the challenge shifted from discovery to coordinating students, landlords, and Borderpass.
I designed a lease preparation flow that helped groups agree on the details needed to submit an application and move toward a signed lease.
DocuSign handled digital agreements and Stripe supported secure payments, creating a consistent path from interest to tenancy.
Key Experience Design
Designing trust into the system
Trust wasn't treated as a badge or visual layer. It came from how the marketplace worked.
Verified students and landlords reduced uncertainty about who was participating. Structured listings made properties easier to evaluate. Standardized leases and secure payments gave both sides a clearer path through the transaction.
Together, these mechanisms made Borderpass fundamentally different from an open housing marketplace.
Outcome
The housing marketplace was designed and delivered as an expansion of the Borderpass platform.
The product ultimately wasn't launched as company priorities shifted, but the work established a model for how Borderpass could extend its role as a trusted intermediary into housing and other student services.
Reflection
This project reinforced that trust in a marketplace has to be designed into the system, not added through visual cues.
For students making a high-stakes decision from another country, that meant reducing uncertainty at every stage, from who they might live with, to whether a property was legitimate, to what happened after they decided to rent it.
The strongest solutions weren't always the most sophisticated. In several cases, making the experience simpler and closer to how people already behave made it more useful.
© 2026 Nelson Leung in Canada.