Web Scraping for Real Estate Industry

With the advent of the internet, the real estate sector saw a significant transformation. Data was previously difficult to obtain for real estate brokers since it was held in secure locations. Only the selected individuals had access to information about properties, pricing, and other pertinent details. Currently, as the web contains many resources, it’s difficult

With the advent of the internet, the real estate sector saw a significant transformation. Data was previously difficult to obtain for real estate brokers since it was held in secure locations. Only the selected individuals had access to information about properties, pricing, and other pertinent details.

Currently, as the web contains many resources, it’s difficult for everyone to get it all at once from multiple sources. This is where Web scraping comes into play which you will find in this article.

How has the internet changed the face of the real estate industry?

People, like anything else, start their property hunt on the internet. According to a recent NAR (National Association of REALTORS) survey, 90% of house purchasers undertake their research online during the home purchasing process. Hundreds and thousands of homes are available to pick from. All your clients have to do is click the button beside the property to make the property available.

Furthermore, your customers can quickly draw comparisons of prices and other features without even leaving the comfort of their homes. So the real estate websites on the internet have become sellers’ critical arsenal.

Similarly, real estate websites offer a treasure trove of materials for retailers, landlords, real estate agents, and data analysts looking to gather valuable insights and gain a competitive advantage.

What is web scraping?

In real estate, web scraping is the process of gathering creditable real estate data from the internet. You have the option of scraping the data manually or using automated tools such as scrapers.

Usually, the scraper software extracts data from HTML tags on a web page. Then scraper tools will present the data in a format that the humans understand easily for analysis. There are libraries available in programming languages such as Python, including Scrapy and Beautiful Soup, for web scraping. You can find more details about how you can perform web scraping in the relevant article.

What real estate data do you need for scraping?

When you scrape data from competitor websites such as Airbnb, Rightmove, and Zillow, they could provide the following information:

• Location of the property
• Property type
• Size of the property
• Price
• Sales price
• Monthly retail prices
• Details of the seller
• Parking space
• No of bedrooms
• Area in square feet
• Customer profiles

How web scraping could benefit the real estate industry?

When you scrape the data mentioned above from competitor websites, it will not only arm you with expertise on properties. But also on extensive knowledge of customers such as their preferred buying patterns, demographics, etc.

Hence you can serve your customers to the highest degree with such a wealth of data. Regularly scraping property websites for fresh listings will keep you up to date and make you appear trustworthy and reputable to customers.

Below is how web scraping could benefit the real estate industry:

1. It keeps track of your competitors.

When you know what your competitors are doing, you can build a strategy to sell better than them. Indeed, your competitors will have a specific strategy that assists them in tapping buyers instantly.

So you need to consistently monitor what strategies they’re using and the buying patterns of their customers. In the real estate field, plenty of new agents are emerging. They’re always looking at strategies to sell better to the customers. Therefore, you need to analyze your competitors better, which would enhance you to make better business decisions.

2. Updated strategic information is available.

Since Web scraping provides recent property listings, you”ll have the edge over your competitors on market updates. In addition, web scraping can also discover data points in locations agents rarely navigate. The result would be a giant data pool that would stand you out from competitors.

These substantial data pools in online databases provide data for various business insights. As a result, you could use them to utilize enhanced business decisions.

3. For improved online interactions

One of the most precise ways to better interact with your consumers is the internet. The internet platform lets you interact with customers by establishing the best content strategy. Such content strategies include relevant blogs and regular social media posts to create quality videos and graphics. It would certainly attract your customers. Also, Web scraping would certainly make this process a lot easier.

So now then, How can your content framework stand out among the tons of blogs, articles, and videos posted online?

With web scraping, you can scrape all popular blog posts that attract buyers and likely Call To Action. In addition, scraping videos, they would like to watch and capturing the opinions of real estate agents would undoubtedly help. It’s convenient to reach your prospects and transform them into qualified sales leads when you have all the relevant details.

4. Better Investment Decisions

Manually acquiring accurate, updated real estate data is a time-consuming procedure that makes investors make reckless financial judgments. However, the invention of  Web scraping enabled real estate investors to have access to factual, usable, and qualitative data evidence. 

Rather than depending on inadequate or outdated data, this knowledge assists investors in making intelligent judgments. For investment research, gathering property data from a range of real estate listing websites is a necessity.

5. Assists in the removal of negative reviews

With escalation competition and the number of rivals pursuing other companies, it’s natural for businesses to receive negative feedback unintentionally. There might be a variety of reasons for this, including disrupting another agency and many more. Regardless of your actions, a negative review might force your customer to rethink doing business with you. It can be a terrifying experience.

As a result, web scraping aids in the elimination of this problem. You can scrape through all of the evaluations published about your brand using web scraping before anyone cause any damage. When you scrape your website regularly, you will maintain a positive image of your brand.

6. Rental Efficiency

Before investing in real estate assets, rental income is an essential factor to consider. Realtors can find homes with the most appealing rental revenues based on location by scraping internet data. Based on the scraped data, investors may simply identify which properties to invest in. Scraping also answers essential concerns, such as preferred properties with the highest Return on Investment (ROI) in specific locations. 

Real estate web scraping services give high-quality data for research to aid in investing decisions.

7. Find out about real estate agents.

Users can collect information from a variety of online sources via web scraping activities in real estate. When you have a list of real estate agents on a realtor website, it can change the tide of business

Also, web scraping enables organizations to acquire additional information about real estate agents with discussion forums, directories, agent profiles, communities, and agent websites.

Prominent use cases of real estate web scraping

This section will focus on use-cases of web scraping concerning real estate agencies and individual folks.

Real Estate Agencies

Real estate market forecasting: It is mandatory for all the market players such as investors, brokerages, and retailers to forecast the real estate market. As a result, data scraping in the real estate sector assists in collecting historical and present data concerning properties, value, sales cycles, and so on. 

The market players would examine these data by providing data-backed forecasts on how the market will behave, allowing market participants to change their tactics and plans accordingly.

Aggregators of real estate: Web scrapers acquire real-time information from various rich-data sources to classify prime markets and properties of sale. As a result, it would help the businesses to comprehend the events taking place in the broader market and align their objectives accordingly. Ultimately it would benefit the consumers by displaying this data on the one-stop-shop website.

Keeping track of vacancy rates: When you perform web scraping, it helps analyze market cycles’ negative and positive revenue growth. It also offers data-driven business insights that may be leveraged to find investment possibilities.

Development of products and services: Web scraping is a powerful tool for product and service development. It enables the gathering of actionable information and the identification of market prospects. For example, OpenDoor, which has a market capitalization of $2 billion, used data scraping to create algorithms that quickly provided immediate bids to homeowners looking to sell their homes swiftly.

Keeping a close eye on the competition: In this highly competitive industry, keeping an eye on the competitors is also critical. Data scraping allows companies to acquire real-time pricing intelligence data and respond quickly to price fluctuations in order to remain competitive. Finally, this information aids in the acquisition of a customer or business.

Individual folks

Web scraping is not entirely about helping businesses only. Actually, part of what makes it so popular is how easy it is for a single person to use it with the help of some online scraping tools such as Zillow.

Investing: You should know how quickly you’ll break even and what returns you should expect if you want to invest in homes. You can invest in these homes by buying at a low price and selling later for a profit or just renting the property.

Buying and selling: Before buying or selling a property, you must correctly evaluate its value. Wouldn’t it be a shame to sell your childhood house just to find it on a real estate website a week later for double the price?

Proxies for web scraping real estate data

As you’ve probably figured out by now, successful analysis necessitates the scraping of massive quantities of data. Although scraping data from websites is perfectly legal, you must follow the rules of the website you’re scraping data from. If you try to visit a restricted website, though, you will find yourself in hot water.

Anti-scraping techniques are used on such websites because they are concerned that rivals may steal their material. You can use residential proxies to get around this limitation.

In short, proxies are an essential element of the web scraping process since they allow you to acquire data from public data sources using various IP addresses.

Find out more on how you can use proxies for web scraping here.

Conclusion

We hope you now understand the basics of web scraping in the real estate sector. Because of the internet’s ubiquity, most retail agents and people utilize it to do product searches. As a result, real estate brokers now have access to a wealth of data kept on the internet to help them make better business decisions.

To get the best results, we recommend utilizing proxies with your scraper tools.