Web scraping Real Estate Data – How to scrape house prices
As many cities continue to develop homes and communities, the demand for real estate continues to grow! Many different real estate websites are useful for both buyers, sellers and real estate agents. These websites give you valuable data like prices, images, area, rooms and bathrooms. You can also use these websites to find commercial properties as great thing about these websites is that their MLS listings. Meaning you can have access to multiple real estate listings that are ever, Trying to find and extract real estate data manually can be a long and tedious, we’ll show you how to use a real estate scraper like ParseHub. We’ll teach you how to scrape a real estate website to extract useful information you can use for:Price comparisonCreate a list of properties for clientsIndustry insightsBefore we show you the steps, do note that some real estate websites have blockers that prevent you from scraping their website. Our customer support team will be more than happy to help you with any of your web scraping projects. So let’s get started! Choosing a real estate scraperTo get started, you will need to download and install our free real estate scraper. While there are several web scrapers avaiable, we think you’ll enjoy ParseHub. Its free to use and has a suite of features we think you’ll enjoy like scheduling and IP wnload ParseHub For freeWeb scraping a real estate website’s dataFor this example, we are going to scrape Royal lepage. We are going to scrape residential properties that have the following requirements:For sale in CalgaryPrice range of $400, 000 to $700, 000Located in the SW quadrantYou can use this link if you want to follow scraping real estate data videoScraping the Real estate Results PageOnce ParseHub is downloaded and installed, open the app, click on “New Project” and use the URL from the Royal LePages result page. The page will now be rendered inside the app. 2. Once the website is rendered, a selection function will automatically be created. If not, you can click on the plus sign next to the page selection. 3. Click on the first address listing on the page. The address you’ve clicked will become green to indicate that it’s been selected. 4. ParseHub will now suggest the other elements you want to extract. The remaining addresses on the page will be highlighted in yellow. Click on the second address on the list. All of the items that were previously highlighted in yellow are now green because they are selected. 5. On the left sidebar, rename your selection to “Address”. You will notice that ParseHub is now extracting the address and URL for each listing. 6. On the left sidebar, click the PLUS(+) sign next to the address selection and choose the Relative Select command. 7. Using the Relative Select command, click on the first address of the listing on the page and then on the price. You will see an arrow connect the two selections. 8. Expand the new command you’ve created and then delete the URL that is also being extracted by default. 9. Repeat step 7 to also extract the number of rooms, property type and city. Make sure to rename your new selections have now selected all the data we wanted to scrape from the results page. Your project should now look like this:Scraping more data from each real estate listingNow, we will tell ParseHub to click on each listing we’ve selected and extract additional data from each page. In this case, we will extract:ImagesProperty descriptionProperty informationFirst, on the left sidebar, click on the 3 dots next to the main_template your template to” listing_results_page” or anything you see fit. Templates help ParseHub keep different page layouts separate, and will help you organize your use the PLUS(+) button next to your “address” selection and choose the “Click” command. A pop-up will appear asking you if this link is a “next page” button. Click “No” and next to Create New Template input a new template name, in this case, we will use Listing_page. ParseHub will now automatically create this new template and render the first property listing on the results page3. Click on one of the images of the property, It will be highlighted in green and all the other suggested images will be highlighted in yellow. Click on the next image in yellow to extract the imagesNote* For this example, we are only scraping the first few images that are part of the carousel. You can learn how to scrape all of the images from a carousel here. Click on PLUS (+) sign next to the page command use choose select5. While using the select command, click on the property information description. Usually in these descriptions contain keywords that buyers search for when looking for a place, ie. “open concept”. Rename your selection to “property_information” or anything you see fit7. Now let’s extract the building features! Click on PLUS (+) sign next to the page command use choose select then click on one of the labels under “building features”. Once you’ve selected a label, click on the next label that is highlighted in yellow. Rename your selection to building_features9. Click on the PLUS (+) next to your “building_features” selection and choose the relative select command. 10. Click on the first label then click on the feature. You may need need to do this a couple of times to teach ParseHub what you want to listing_page template should look like this:We can add pagination to this project depending on how many listings you want to scrape. Since this current project has 2 results pages, let’s show you how you can deal with ’s setup ParseHub to navigate to the next results the left sidebar, return to the listing_results_page template. You might also need to change the browser tab to the search results page as on the PLUS(+) sign next to the page selection and choose the Select select the Next page link at the bottom of the Royal Lepage website. Rename the selection to next_button. By default, ParseHub will extract the text and URL from this link, so expand your new next_button selection and remove these 2 commands. Now, click on the PLUS (+) sign of your next_button selection and use the Click command. A pop-up will appear asking if this is a “Next” link. Click Yes and enter the number of pages you’d like to navigate to. In this case, we will scrape 1 additional final project should look something like thisRunning and Exporting your Real Estate Scraping ProjectNow our project is ready to scrape Royal Lepage. To do this, simply click on the left sidebar and click on the green “Get Data” ’ll be brought to this page:This is where you can test, run or schedule your project. For longer and bigger projects, we recommend doing a Test Run just to make sure your data will be extracted and formatted for this project, click on the “Run” button to begin your ParseHub is done scraping the website, you will be notified by email and you’ll be able to download your extracted data as an Excel/CSV or as a JSON osing thoughtsNow you know how to scrape a real estate website like Royal Lepage to create a list of properties for list can be used for price comparison, given to clients, and industry note that some real estate websites will block web scrapers from extracting data. You will need to use our IP rotation you need help with any of your projects, you can contact our customer support team by using our live chat or using our contact page where they will be more than happy to help! Happy Scraping! Download ParseHub For free
Using A MLS API And Real Estate API For Listings Data
The real estate industry is in slow yet constant evolution. As the property market expands, agencies and independent realtors need to become fortune tellers to predict what the future holds. They need to keep track of even the most subtle changes in property value, neighborhood demand, and real estate trends to stay competitive and increase their chances of success.
Table of Contents
1. What Is Real Estate Scraping?
2. Why Is Real Estate Scraping Valuable in Business?
3. Use Cases of a Real Estate Scraper
4. Why Use a Web Scraping API
The data available is vast, and it’s often challenging to keep tabs on all the factors that affect the industry. Web scraping real estate is a powerful tool for monitoring all this information and keeping up with the times. It helps streamline data research and analysis so that agents can spend their energy on other important business activities.
A real estate scraper helps collect and visualize all relevant data quickly and efficiently. If you want to learn more about how web scraping is affecting real estate, the value of web scraping in this industry, and the best approach to conduct real estate investor scraping effectively, read on.
What Is Real Estate Scraping?
As realtors and agencies work to grow their business and stay ahead of their competitors, they find themselves on the hunt for more effective and innovative tools. Real estate scraping offers an excellent alternative way to find prospective buyers and improve sales intelligence. It allows you to gather the information you need to fulfill your everyday business operations.
Furthermore, web scraping real estate is a helpful method to navigate, collect, and organize large sets of data. It allows you to sort out common user inquiries online and provides you with relevant and actionable information. You can take advantage of the extracted data to set up more attractive listing descriptions and beat your competition. Moreover, this powerful technique can be adapted to your specific needs. You can customize your parameters for better, more accurate results.
You might already be aware of how competitive it can get in the real estate market and the risks of investing in it. Web scraping will let you stay ahead of the curve to maximize gains while minimizing uncertainties. The right data collection strategy provides you with:
Updated strategic data — It reveals business insights that will let you make informed decisions. Web scraping will give you access to hard-to-detect areas and detect data points you might otherwise miss.
Listing proficiency — A real estate listings scraper will allow you to learn about rental income revenue and property value around you or in a specific area. You can compare and contrast this information to be better prepared to invest or sell.
Use real estate agent’s data — By scraping details from several online resources, you can harvest information that real estate agents have placed all over the web. Moreover, you can study agent profiles, directories, and competitor sites to learn more about your competitors and their business.
Why Is Real Estate Scraping Valuable in Business?
There are a vast number of reasons to choose scraping software to get real estate data. Whether you’re on the lookout for available property or you need to obtain information to make business decisions, web scraping will expedite things for you. You can scrape a trustworthy real estate site to gather information on property details, buyers, sellers, and agents in your area, and more. Web scraping can narrow down results among the massive amount of data available and make your life much easier.
Instead of searching for the most credible information manually in the massive pool of data that is the web, a real estate web scraper will help you acquire
current, precise, and reliable information from across the internet with little effort. Knowledge is power. It can help you increase your profit margins. Some of the information you might find relevant when web scraping real estate listings (and that can make or break a real estate deal) is:
Type of property
Average sale price
Location
Amenities
Square footage
Average rental price
Property agent
Neighborhood perks
Long-term capital gain
A sneak peek at this information can help you improve your communication strategy and better position your properties in the market. All you’ll need to worry about afterward is putting your business out there for the right clients to find you.
Use Cases of a Real Estate Scraper
The information obtained when web scraping for real estate has numerous case uses. These are some of the most relevant proven ways to use data in your favor in the real estate industry:
1. Accurately deducing your property’s value
Whether you’re selling your childhood home or one of the many properties in your real estate emporium, you need information on the current real estate pricing for your type of property in your area. Doing your research and analyzing what similar properties are worth could help you boost your profit margins and avoid underpricing your own. Market research is vital to getting the best deal every time.
2. Real estate aggregators
The real estate business relies heavily on staying up to date with all relevant information. Building an aggregator to gather real-time real estate information from numerous data sources will allow you to effortlessly make side-by-side comparisons. Having all the information you need neatly organized in the same place will help you expedite the whole process.
3. Make better investment decisions
When investing in real estate, you can’t simply rely on vague information that’s not the most accurate and current. That’s when you can benefit from scraping as a way to collect fresh real estate data to ease your way into real estate investing. Performing a timely analysis of your options will prevent you from trusting an educated guess when investing and stop you from leaving your decisions to chance.
4. Maximize rental yield
Rental yield is probably one of the most notable concepts in real estate. Scraping real estate websites will help you understand which properties have the best rental yield in your area. It will also offer clear data on the most common property types in a given neighborhood and which have the highest return on investment. This information will help you sustain a strategic advantage over your competitors.
5. Forecasting market trends
Investors, realtors, and brokerages can all benefit from making the right market projections. Real estate scraping is an excellent way to collect historical intelligence on past property value and other relevant factors to keep in mind. Analyzing this data is a reliable method that helps make more accurate predictions on how the market will evolve over time and adjust strategies accordingly.
6. Monitoring competitors
To stay competitive in the market, you must beat what others are doing. Data scraping will help you gather real-time information on your competitors’ efforts and learn more about their pricing and offers. This information is helpful when developing your own strategies and winning customers.
7. Keeping tabs on vacancy rates.
Data scraping will give you the information you need to assess both positive and negative rental stats. It’ll give you insights into the market cycle, rental growth, and investment opportunities that could improve your return on investment.
Why Use a Web Scraping API
A web scraping API can be an absolute lifesaver. It offers a better solution than relying on already existing real estate websites by allowing you to choose the information you actually need rather than wasting your time sorting messy listings.
After reading of the many uses of web scraping for real estate and its benefits, you might feel tempted to build a scraper for real estate properties. While this might be a viable solution for some, it’s a time-consuming process that requires at least a little programming skill. If you’re a beginner and would rather spend your efforts on putting the results of your research to good use, you should consider purchasing a pre-built scraping bot. Creating your own from scratch may require you to:
Learn a programming language
Find the data you want to extract
Learn data parsing fundamentals
Inspect the website code
Download and install libraries and other elements
Write your own code
Although creating your own scraping tool can potentially give you more customization options, it could also be a total headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. No two sites are the same, and finding different patterns and layouts could cause errors and other pitfalls that result in wasting valuable time while performing your research.
What To Look for in a Web Scraping API for Real Estate
Purchasing the right tool for scraping real estate data will save you lots of time in your data-gathering exercise. However, you must make sure the one you choose meets your data gathering needs and more. You’ll highly benefit from a scraping API that can:
Manage and rotate your proxies
Give you consistent and timely results
Provide clear and organized outputs
Allow browsing scalability
Provide CAPTCHA-solving solutions
Parse metadata for you
Our Scraping Robot API makes an effective real estate scraper. If you want to test our modules and learn more about us, visit our site today. No signup or login required!
The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.
How to scrape data from Real estate websites | Scrapeworks
“Deep beneath everything, there’s data”
The power of data cannot be stressed enough. Anything that is today, and there will be in the future all started somewhere at some granular level with the insights drawn upon data.
With just data, there’s nothing much you can do. Essentially, data with quality is out of which remarkable insights are born.
Digital innovations born out of this data has been disrupting every industry. The ways and means of doing business have been transformed incredibly in the past decade or so.
Is the real estate market any different?
Fortunately not!
As pointed out by NAR, about 92% of buyers house-hunt online. Online research is the most convenient and easy form of acquiring instant information and it does not limit to just that. Moving from traditional classifieds to websites or app or digitizing anything for that matter, offers some broad benefits – effective community outreach, curating real-time updates, indexed listings, and exposure to exhaustive data points.
“Online real estate business draws buyers and sellers closer, promotes transparency, and unleashes the power of progress”
The meaty role of data in real estate business
A good, credible, and informative real estate website is one that has a huge database of real estate listings covering wide data points like – property details, buyer and seller information, and agent information. It is the presence of such huge amount of data that helps smarter decision-making absolute ease.
A large pool of information that is authentic and credible will help buyers make a more informed decision. To acquire this kind of data from across the internet, real estate data extraction will help in getting all the information that is essential for successful real estate business.
When it comes to large volumes of data that is lying around the web in different formats and different sources, there’s no other best solution like scraping that brings all the data hidden almost anywhere. Particularly for real estate data scraping, people search for various aspects – real estate listings, agent information, the price of the property, plot information, seller profiles and a lot more.
To provide the best real estate services, you need to have a repository of data that covers vast data point spread. Also, constantly refreshing this information will make you more reliable. This data could be stuck in websites, classifieds or any other digital source. Scraping this information will help you own the most exhaustive and authentic information that your clients can trust in terms of quality and in making informed decisions.
Some valuable data points to scrape:
Agent information
Property data
Price data
Address
Reviews
Property size
City/State/Zip code
Rent price
Images
The Scraping process: The path to a more rewarding real estate business.
Scraping real estate listings would mean setting up web crawlers to scrape the desired data points held in real estate websites and other sources like digital classifieds. The bots would fetch this data and the information will be transformed into a structured format that enables analytics.
This data can be integrated using different formats or through any preferred database options. It could be integrated through FTP/AWS in CSV, XML, and text files.
Apart from having the basic property details, you portals should have details of agents, legal teams for real estate business, brokers, value assessment providers etc. Such data will help you stand out competition and attract more visitors to your site considering the vast amount of information you offer.
Data becomes stale over a period of time due to constant changes and updates. You can also stay updated with the changes by getting notified about it through periodic scraping that can span over a week, month, or beyond.
The Millennial momentum
The main target for the real estate business must hands down be the millennials – as the kids who rode their bikes on the suburbs a decade back, now fall under the main investor groups in the real estate market. The reason being – moving or shifting houses due to frequent job changes, moving to new cities, investment as an option etc.
This clan is known for its online presence, and most of the deals conclude as a result of apartment hunting through online searches. Also, they are on the lookout for plenty of information covering a broad spectrum of questions like:
-Previous owners of property
-Restaurants close by
-Price information
-Who else is interested ( in order to explore roommate options)
-Safety/security
-Proximity to the workplace ( Transit facility)
So to be able to cover tons of questions, you need to have enough data. Though you cannot accommodate oceans of data points on your site, you must never have shallow content that
Innovate with information: The age of apps
To get close to personalized experience, there’s a need to innovate. The real industry is just warming up with innovation through AI.
An evolution from web to personalized site to the app would ideally be adding intelligence to elevate the experience by getting a step closer with your customer by understanding the search patterns and giving suggestions parallel to their choices. For instance, if the buyer’s search is aligned to a feature, say in-house laundry unit, then your website or app would basically recommend houses with similar facilities.
Some interesting innovations like 3D house feature that will enable a google street view to take a glimpse of the inside of the house are also something you can innovate through your apps.
Apart from this, tons of features like connecting to agents, live chatbots, notifying when a new property is listed that closely aligns with search and taste, analyzing search patterns and giving recommendations and a lot more.
The entire process is immense efforts, investment on resources, trial and error, research, and accommodation for risks.
But what is the one major barrier?
Hands-down, building the foundation for this very thought needs data. Getting this data that forms the basis for all the savvy innovations you are ready to put out in the market is already out there.
The process of scraping will help you build a strong database from where some tremendous evolutions will take place. As you look back, there will be data that has enabled you to triumph by walking you through the path to innovate.
Every Real estate business needs scraping solutions
Real estate industry is blossoming with vast opportunities day after day. Staying relevant with the online search trends is paramount to success. There is no better solution than scraping information to offer the best service to your customers in the form of quality data. Also, using the same information as the foundation to disrupt the industry with newer technology and innovations in the form of highly intelligent apps.
Scrapeworks is perfectly engineered to fulfill all your real estate web scraping needs. It, in fact, can be the base for your dreams to innovate and revolutionize the market.
You can set your parameters for the scraping requirements and we can deliver the data that you want.
Read through our customer stories to understand how we helped a US-based commercial real estate firm extract property data with ownership and lease details and how we aggregated construction tender information from government and public sources.
If you have a similar need, do get in touch with us.
Nandhini
Blogger and Community Manager
Frequently Asked Questions about scrape mls listings
Can you scrape MLS data?
Rather than manually trawling the real estate database for changes in listings, the MLS API scrapes the database for you and sends along every change it comes across.Mar 12, 2021
What is scraping in real estate?
Scraping real estate listings would mean setting up web crawlers to scrape the desired data points held in real estate websites and other sources like digital classifieds. The bots would fetch this data and the information will be transformed into a structured format that enables analytics.
Can you access the MLS without being a Realtor?
Can buyers access the MLS without a realtor? The short answer is no, they can’t — at least not directly. In order to access the MLS, you need a real estate license, which means it’s not possible for buyers to access this data on their own.Jul 22, 2021