LeaseYourCar

The job

Lease specials are advertised all over dealer sites, and every dealer words them differently. LeaseYourCar puts California specials in one place, shows the two numbers a shopper compares first, the monthly payment and the amount due at signing, and sends an enquiry to the single dealer behind the listing instead of selling it to a list.

I led development at Bizdesire. It is a MERN application: MongoDB, an Express API on Node.js, and a React front end, deployed on Heroku. My own hands-on work was the part the site depends on most, getting the listings in.

Listings that start as dealer copy

A dealer's lease special is a paragraph of advertising copy. The facts a shopper needs are in there: make, model, year and trim, the monthly payment, what is due at signing, the term, the mileage allowance and the excess-mileage charge, credit requirements, the dealer's location and when the offer expires. Every dealer writes them in a different order, with different labels and different fine print.

The scrapers collect that copy from the source. Getting the text was the easy half; turning it into fields the site can sort, filter and display was the real work.

A model as the formatter

Hand-written parsers for every dealer's wording would break each time a dealer changed a template. Instead, each scraped offer goes through the OpenAI API, which reads the text and returns the same structured fields every time. The pipeline then updates MongoDB with those listings, so the site always works from one consistent shape whatever the source looked like.

That is what makes the cards comparable. Every listing shows the monthly payment and due at signing in the same place, because every listing went through the same formatting step.

One dealer, not a list

The enquiry form asks only for a name, mobile and email, with no Social Security number, and it is an enquiry rather than a purchase, reservation or credit application. It goes to the one partner dealer on that listing, who confirms availability and the out-the-door price. Tax, title, licence and dealer fees are stated as extra, so the advertised numbers are never presented as more than they are.