Scrape Real Estate Listings For Personal Or Business Use

Web scraping refers to extracting any publicly available data from a website — usually at a large scale — and storing it in a different file format. Web scraping is the fastest, most efficient way to collect vast amounts of data from the web.‌

Web scraping is essential in modern real estate. Agents and home buyers alike have much to gain from real estate scrapers.

How Web Scraping Is Affecting Real Estate — and Why it Has Value for Businesses

The property market is constantly evolving and expanding. With that change and growth comes a myriad of questions: Will prices rise? What neighborhoods are in high demand? What’s preventing that quaint little house by the elementary school from selling? To answer these and other questions, realtors need data. Enter: real estate web scraping.‌

Scraping real estate data allows you to provide high-quality real estate services and solutions for the benefit of your clients. A real estate listings scraper generates parameters that the realtor can investigate further in order to gauge sales and potential home buyers. The following data points can be obtained by scraping real estate data:

• Property type
• Sale price
• Location
• Size
• Agent
• Amenities
• Monthly rent
• Available parking spaces‌

In addition, you can take an advanced approach to gather additional data on: crime and safety, foreclosure and auctions listings, construction permits, and more. Real estate web scraping is becoming an important process of this business because it helps to remain competitive in the market.‌

Access to all of that delicious data makes it easier to make better business decisions, communicate with buyers more effectively, and sell more properties — quickly, efficiently, and profitably.‌

How to Build a Scraper for Real Estate Properties

Web scraping occurs in three simple steps:

• Communicate with the website or app server that’s carrying the data and send it a GET request.‌ Include all of your criteria for the data you want to scrape. If the server judges your communication request as safe and legitimate, you’ll receive your requested data in raw web content form — most likely in HTML code.
• While the HTML you receive contains valuable data, you can’t use it as-is. Step two is parsing the HTML code into a tree structure path.
• Finally, depending on your coding language and library, search and organize your data accordingly.‌‌

One of the biggest advantages of building your own web scraper is how well you get to know it. Fixes are extremely manageable because you know your web scraper from top to bottom, and knowing everything about it means you can customize it however you need to.‌

You can make your own web scraper in Python, PHP, R, and more.‌

Proxies for Real Estate Scraping

Simply put, a web scraping proxy enhances your business strategy. But how do you choose which proxy is right for your real estate scraper? There are several options when it comes to real estate scraping:‌

Residential proxies

Pros: Residential proxies are the most popular choice for web scraping. Residential proxies are sourced through an internet service provider (ISP). These proxies reduce bans and improve efficiency by allowing users to be seen as connections coming from individual residences, not data centers.‌

Cons: Residential proxies cost more than some other proxies, and there is a charge for bandwidth on residential proxies.‌

Data center proxies

Pros: Data Center proxies are the most common proxies and the most affordable choice.‌

Cons: Data center proxies allow you to hide your IP address, but they are easily identifiable as coming from a data center. This makes it obvious to sites that you’re using a proxy.‌

ISP proxies

Pros: ISP Proxies provide the fastest access to websites. ISP proxies also get fewer bans than data center proxies, and they’re easier to maintain than their rotating counterparts. They also perform much better than data center IPs for use cases that require a high degree of authority.‌

Cons: They cost more than other proxy options.‌

Rotating proxies

Pros: A rotating proxy changes its IP address every time you make a connection. Every time you connect to a port, your traffic will be automatically routed to a new proxy IP.‌

Cons: Rotating proxies only allow for HTTPS connections.‌

Dedicated proxies

Pros: Dedicated proxies are only used by one user. All dedicated proxies allow HTTPS and SOCKS connections.‌

Cons: Because you utilize the same IP address to visit the same websites over and over, dedicated proxies are more easily traced by websites. In addition, the fact that dedicated proxies are only used by one user may be viewed as a con by some.‌

Semi-dedicated proxies

Pros: Semi-dedicated proxies are shared between up to three users. All semi-dedicated proxies allow HTTPS and SOCKS connections.‌

Cons: sharing an IP address — even among just a few users — may jeopardize reliability. Sharing bandwidth may also affect performance metrics.‌

Why Rayobyte’s Residential and ISP Proxies Are The Best Choices for Web Scraping

At Rayobyte, we understand that you’re not just looking for proxies — you’re looking for success with real estate web scraping.‌

We’re here to help. With the lowest risk of bans, our residential proxies offer the highest rate of success for our large-scale scraping customers. Take control of the data that will bring your business to new heights with residential proxies that not only bring success, but also break the barriers so many scrapers encounter in their major scraping projects.‌

Looking for top-speed proxies instead? Because our ISP proxies are still based in data centers, you get the “best of both worlds”: residential-level authority and ban prevention combined with data center speeds and availability.‌

Building your real estate scraper is about to get a lot easier. Check out our pricing model or get in touch with us today — we think you’ll see the Rayobyte difference.

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.