We have an almost limitless amount of data for everything, thanks to the internet’s widespread use.
Real estate websites scraping importance has grown in accordance with the market competition, utilizing real estate data might be key to your success.
It’s important to have access to data and keep your data sets up-to-date at all times.
All major real estate websites have similarities but some unique challenges as well.
Real estate websites generally have a consistent format that is easy to understand for a regular user.
Most of the time, they typically follow the same design pattern.
For example, if you check:
- realtor.com
- zillow.com
- apartments.com
You will notice that all of those websites have almost the same landing page.
That is probably because that was tested to be the most effective user experience for real estate websites’ first landing page.
If you start searching data, you might as well notice some other similarities.
Real Estate Website Differences
Although, from the software application perspective, all of the listed websites are totally different.
The backend structure is different.
How data is loaded to the browsers is different.
Each element has a different data type, variables, structure, and many more.
It’s similar to eCommerce websites’ difficulties when we talk about scraping etsy.com or getting data from the Amazon marketplace.
Real Estate Websites Scraping Challenges
If it is so much trouble, why would anyone bother scraping all of those websites?
Maybe it is better just to choose the right one and stick with it.
However, it is essential to validate the information of the listings.
Mostly since many real estate websites might have their own unique listings.
Therefore, if the goal is to gather all the necessary real estate information, you will need all of those websites.
How Anyone Can Scrape All Real Estate Websites?
Well, there are many ways to do it.
Real estate websites have one common thing – Real estate listings that you can find on any of those websites contain about 60-80 core fields depending on the website.
There is a broad list of data that will help to validate the information of your listing.
The listings data change very frequently, mostly when there are newly added or deleted real estate listings.
It is crucial to start by mapping out the key elements of the listing data points to name.
Also, target everything properly.
However, you should also consider that whatever the amount of your sample is, there is still a chance that you will not get all the types of listings.
Some of them can either have mistakes, errors, missing images, wrong dimensions, fields messed up, and so on.
That is why, what you should do instead, is to keep track of each element separately.
As well as try to build custom cases around each one of them.
Solution To Any Real Estate Website Scraping
Real estate website scraping services is a process that combines an automation software or tool with the manual work of real estate experts, who know the ins and outs of every single website.
Currently, there are several types of website scraping services to consider.
Generally, automation requires very complex programming skills and an understanding of Real Estate Website Scripting Languages.
Real Estate software applications will take care of all the manual work involved in real estate website scraping and real estate web data extraction.
The idea behind all that is very similar to eCommerce data scraping due to the nature of its’ structure.
Real estate coders have expert-level knowledge of most international Real estate websites with their backend structure, databases, and programming languages used to build them.
What Information Can Real Estate Websites Scraper Provide?
Scraping applications extract data fields, such as listings, property names, property information, description, property price, sellers’ profiles, agent information, property location, reviews, agents’ information, photos, and plot details.
Exposing this data to your consumers will provide them with the most reliable and comprehensive real estate property information.
They can trust this information when making decisions and receiving good service.
We store all extracted data in clients’ preferred format: CSV, HTML, XML, JSON, TXT, Database, and so on.
It is also possible to extract a million rows of data within a matter of hours.
These are the best real estate websites to scrape data from:
- realtor.com
- apartments.com
- zillow.com
Realtor.com Scraping
Realtor.com is the leading real estate property website in the United States.
It is home to more than 800,000 active listings and 5 million sold properties.
This vast amount of data provides you with many opportunities to connect your business with potential customers and build strong brands that bring people together and drive revenue into your company’s pockets.
Scraping Realtor.com is an intelligent investment in your business’s future, allowing you to get more out of data.
There are many benefits of scraping Realtor.com, including:
- Increase relevancy and conversion of advertising campaigns by offering consumers the most comprehensive and detailed information about each property.
- Reduce business costs by improving work efficiency and productivity. No more time is wasted on conducting research, and the work gets completed quickly with fewer people involved.
- Improve & streamline operational workflow across your entire business from sales to marketing, from technology to accounting departments, using fully automated data feeds from Realtor.com.
- Increase return on investment by saving costs, generating new revenue streams, and reducing company expenses related with manually looking up contact information, business profiles, and agent reviews.
Apartments.com Scraping
Apartments.com is one of the largest apartment-listing websites, with more than 5 million furnished apartments in its database across all 50 states.
It is an established market leader, which means that most people looking for an apartment are already aware of this website.
They use it as their primary source to find an apartment to rent or buy.
However, apart from its solid customer base, Apartments.com provides a fabulous online presence that is suitable for commercial purposes due to the high volume of daily traffic it gets.
By scraping Apartments.com, you can access valuable data such as a current list of available apartments sorted by price range.
This can also include images and detailed information about location, size, amenities, etc.
Based on the extracted data, it will be possible to analyze market trends and get insights into competitor activity.
You can create a user list based on their geographical location.
This list of information is precious for marketers who want to acquire more customers or are planning to run an advertising campaign by sending out personalized messages.
Zillow.com Scraping
There is no doubt that Zillow.com is one of the most popular real estate websites in the United States, with more than 40 million unique users each month.
The sheer volume of visitors provides you with a lot of opportunities to increase user engagement and convert website traffic into revenue.
This is why you should consider scraping Zillow.com to improve company processes, increase customer satisfaction and deliver more value to your customers.
The benefits of scraping Zillow.com include:
- Increasing sales by providing detailed information about properties listed on Zillow’s website. Increasing the conversion of your business’s marketing campaigns by making it easier to reach new potential customers.
- Improving the success of your advertising campaign by understanding what information your customers are looking for. This helps you to improve sales and marketing strategies.
- Increasing company performance & productivity by automating the process of monitoring competitor activity and matching their prices. This can save time spent on manual research.
Conclusion
Real estate website scraping is a tedious and time-consuming process that requires your full attention.
Real estate data extraction automation has been designed to provide Agents, Brokers, Investors, and Realtors with a way to easily and quickly obtain the data they need from websites such as Apartments.com Zillow.com, Realtor.com… etc., and regroup it into an organized database.
Information about properties, their location, price, and pictures are all very valuable to make good financial decisions when entering this market.