Best Web Scrapers
In a hurry?
The best Realtor scraper in 2023, as found in our independent testing, is ScraperAPI!
Do you need the best real estate scraper to scrape real estate listings data from realtor.com or similar websites?
Web scrapers have been around for quite some time now and for good reasons. They have made data collection quick and easy, enabling businesses to make huge profits.
In this internet-driven era, websites have become more important than ever before.
From consumer trends to product information, websites contain information that businesses can leverage to gain a competitive edge.
Scrapers pull out data from websites to source content related to marketing information and product price. This is usually done to keep track of market competition and trends.
Web scraping also provides scrapers with private information, such as contact details and addresses of clients and employees. This information could be further used for bulk mailing or other marketing techniques.
It’s a common misbelief that web scrapers are only useful for online businesses.
However, it turns out that web scrapers can be used for market research in any business.
Talking about the real estate sector, most people make their purchase decisions based on the information available on real estate websites.
Best Real Estate Scrapers 2023
If you own a real estate business, know that a realtor scraper is a must-have for you.
Nowadays, real estate websites are widely used, and thousands of people post about their properties online.
From a property’s address to its owner’s contact details, scraping can provide you with tons of useful information that you can use to your advantage.
Here’s a quick look at the best real estate scrapers:
- ScraperAPI – 🏆 Winner!
- Oxylabs
- Bright Data
- Apify
- Scrapy
- Selenium
- Beautiful Soup
1. ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is the heavy hitter on this list of the best web scrapers for the real estate business. It is a premium web scraper with a free plan.
If you are looking to scrape data from websites for market research and generate huge sales but are skeptical because of the high costs and uncertainty of hiring a full-fledged developer, ScraperAPI is an ideal option for you.
ScraperAPI allows you to effectively gather data from any website or web page, even without needing to know how to code.
It saves you tons of time and money by seamlessly collecting the data, even from complex websites.
The best thing about ScraperAPI is its intuitive user interface.
Using it is an absolute walk-in-the-park, yet it is powerful enough to scrape even the most outdated websites.
It enables you to extract real estate data from websites in just a few clicks.
On ScraperAPI , you can easily clean up your data in order to minimize any post-processing.
Once your scraping project is set up, you can manually get the data from their website or schedule it to automatically upload the scraped data to Google Sheets or to your servers.
As mentioned earlier, ScraperAPI is free to use.
However, for more features and advanced scraping, ScraperAPI offers you three different plans.
Furthermore, you can even contact them to get your own customized plan. And yes, you can cancel the subscription whenever you want.
2. Oxylabs
Oxylabs is the next realtor scraper on the list. It is a powerful and easy-to-use scraping tool widely used all over the world.
It is designed to capture various websites on the internet and convert their open data into useful, structured data.
Oxylabs allows you to extract the information you need to get an edge over your competitor.
On Oxylabs, you can scrape just about every website and web page in a matter of a few minutes.
It is pretty simple to use, and you do not need any coding knowledge to operate it.
Oxylabs has three different panels in its interface, i.e., navigation panel, operation panel, and data extraction panel.
The tool automatically extracts the data in the data extraction panel, which you can export to Excel, HTML files, or other formats, such as SQL.
In the operation panel, you can choose from two modes (wizard mode and advanced mode) to configure extraction rules.
The web pages are divided into four types which are a single page, list or table, list and detail, and URL list.
Wizard mode is designed to be easily used by beginners.
With this mode, you can automatically grab data from simple web pages by just following simple instructions step by step to configure a task.
Whereas the advanced mode, as its name suggests, is meant to be used by pro scrapers.
With the advanced mode, you can deal with any complex page structures with the help of innovative features, such as scheduling features, cloud data extraction, and more complex configuration rules.
To grab the data more effectively, Oxylabs also supports cloud data extraction.
Large amounts of cloud servers extract the data for you 24/7 to help you expedite the extraction process and get large-scale accurate web data in a much quicker way.
There are many reasons to love Oxylabs, and its gadgets are one of them. It uses innovative gadgets for your best scraping experience.
It’s an excellent realtor scraper all around.
As far as the pricing is concerned, Oxylabs also offers several packages. You can use the free trial or buy a plan as per your needs.
A basic plan costs $99 per month.
3. Bright Data
Bright Data is your best bet if you want to be able to scrape realtor websites and pages with ease.
You need all the relevant data, but you also need it to be well organized, otherwise you’re going to have to spend a lot of time trawling through it until you find what you need.
Bright Data is great for helping you with datasets and a data collector, so they do all of the hard work for you, and all you need to do is receive the data at the end of it.
If you request a demo, you can even see what’s going on with their features for free.
If you are someone who is worried about the safety of your personal data online, you can also combine their features with a proxy, because they have more than 1.6 million datacenter proxies for you to choose from.
They have residential proxies to choose from too, so there’s no need to go anywhere else to get the job done when scraping realtor pages.
4. Apify
Apify is a Realtor scraper that is a one-stop-shop for all your web scraping, data extraction, and web RPA needs.
If web scraping has left you scratching your head and you are looking for an efficient web scraper with an intuitive user interface, consider using Apify.
Apify comes with dozens of ready-made tools for all kinds of web scraping. With its ground-breaking tools, it can scrape pretty much every website in a flash.
Just pick the right tool, click run, and get your desired data from any real estate website.
Apify is an open cloud platform with extensive documentation and SDKs. If you are a developer, you can also start building your own tools right off the bat.
Not a developer? No problem! Just submit your scraping project, and Apify will soon get in touch with you to help you develop fast and efficient solutions.
5. Scrapy
With plenty of innovative features, Scrapy is surely one of the fastest-growing open-source scrapers on the internet. It is a full-featured scraping framework for python.
It is best known for its lightning-fast speed, and it enables you to grab even complex and laggy web pages in a flash.
This is because Scrapy is written with Twisted, a popular event-driven networking framework for python.
The major part of Scrapy’s fame comes from its ultra-fast speed. The asynchronous capabilities of Scrapy are second to none.
It does not have to wait for a response when handling multiple requests. Expectedly then, it operates faster than most other web scrapers out there.
Another cool thing about this realtor scraper is that it is written in python, and thus, it requires no dependencies. As a cherry on the cake, it operates on all operating systems.
With Scrapy, you can use spiders to crawl the data and send it to a database, CSV file, or JSON object.
It allows more customizations as compared to most web scrapers in the market, and you can even add your add-ons to make it even more useful and functional.
One key glaring issue with Scrapy is that its interface is not user-friendly at all. If you do not have enough knowledge, its interface can leave you in a lurch.
While there are plenty of tutorials and documentation available to help you better understand its working, operating this tool still requires prerequisite knowledge, and learning it could be quite daunting for a beginner.
Coming to its pricing, you would be surprised to know that Scrapy is free of cost.
It checks all the boxes and nails all the fundamental pillars of what makes a good scraper, yet it is free to use.
6. Selenium
Moving on with the list, we have Selenium. Selenium is a robust web scraping tool that was originally developed to facilitate automated web testing.
However, it has also found an off-label use as a web scraper over the past few years.
This gives Selenium a slight edge over other web scrapers as it can be used for automated testing as well as web scraping, allowing you to kill two birds with one stone.
It’s a great realtor scraper all around.
For example, if you need to scrape a web application that also needs to be automatically tested, then you can’t go wrong with Selenium since you get both of these functionalities in a single platform.
There are many reasons to choose Selenium, and the one that stands out the most is that it works well with JavaScript scraping.
In simple words, it can scrape information regarding JavaScript used on a webpage. This has helped many scrapers since many websites use JavaScript to load their content.
The main drawback of using Selenium is the same as one of its pros; this tool is not mainly designed for web scraping.
This essentially means that it is not as user-friendly as most other web scrapers.
Using it is quite challenging, especially if you are just getting started with scraping, and getting your first scraping project off the ground could be quite challenging.
7. Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup is the last web scraper for the real estate business on our list. Beautiful Soup is a powerful python library specifically designed for parsing HTML.
Using it is an absolute cinch, and even those scrapers can easily operate it who are learning basic-level scraping.
Beautiful Soup is particularly known for its exceptional customer care service.
At Beautiful Soup, a team of customer care experts is always willing to help you and assist you with anything you want.
Just leave a question, and they will soon contact you.
It is pertinent to mention that Beautiful Soup is not as fast as most web scrapers.
Especially if you are looking to scrape large datasets, you are likely to experience noticeable bottlenecks and slowdowns. It is usually recommended for quick projects.
How to Scrape Real Estate Listings Data
Scraping real estate websites for property data is pretty easy if you have the right web scraper.
For this purpose, first, copy the URL of the website or web page that you want to extract. Now, launch your web scraper application and paste the URL in the box there.
It will ask you to follow simple steps to scrape data and you will soon have your data extracted.
However, scraping a real estate website with python is a bit of a complicated process and is recommended for only those who have the know-how with python.
If you do not have any knowledge about python, consider using a realtor scraper tool that does not involve the usage of python, such as ScraperAPI.
How to Choose the Best Web Scraper for Scraping Real Estate Listings
With so many web scrapers on the internet, it is understandable that you may be overwhelmed with this many options.
If you are going through a dilemma and don’t know which realtor scraper will be right for you, you can follow a few simple tips to make sure that the web scraper you choose suits your needs.
Ease of Use
The first consideration when choosing a realtor scraper is its ease of use.
Of course, how would you be able to use a scraper to extract data from a website if you do not know how to operate it in the first place?
So, consider choosing a tool that you find easy to use so you won’t have to spend a great deal of time learning it first.
There is plenty of educational content and tutorials available on the internet if you do not know how to use a scraper.
Furthermore, you can also reach out to the customer care service of your web scraper if you find anything hard to understand.
Performance
What’s the point of using a web scraper if it is not capable of extracting multiple pages quickly and efficiently?
It goes without saying that performance is the main consideration and for a web scraper to be successful, its performance has to be up to the mark.
Nowadays, performance is not an issue with most web scrapers, and they keep improving their services with each passing day to further improve their performance.
However, be mindful that some tools tend to be slower than others, and scaping large datasets on those web scrapers can consume some time.
It is pertinent to mention that more features can also complicate things.
Yes, robust features speed up the process and all, but a beginner can find them hard to understand.
Price
Price is another important consideration when looking for a web scraper. Almost all web scrapers are free to install.
While some of them are free, some may require you to buy a subscription.
In addition, some web scrapers even offer a free trial, so you use it first and then decide for yourself whether or not you should purchase it.
The good news for you is that most platforms offer multiple plans, so you can choose the one that matches your budget while fulfilling your scraping needs.
Of course, the advanced plan comes with more features for advanced scraping and is recommended for those who need to scrape large datasets often.
Customer Support
Using a scraper for the first time could be difficult, and you may have plenty of questions.
From the scraping method to pricing, first-timers may be confused about many things. So, it is recommended to choose a realtor scraper that offers better customer service.
Most web scrapers offer good customer support and get in touch with customers to assist them.
While some of them offer a live chat feature, some provide customer support via Email.
FAQs
What is a Web Scraper?
Web scraping refers to the process of extracting data from a website or a web page.
Similarly, a web scraper is a tool that is used to extract data from websites.
What is Web Scraping in Real Estate?
There are many real estate websites on the internet where thousands of listings are posted every day.
Scraping a real estate website means extracting the data from those listings with a real estate scraping tool AKA realtor scraper, and using it to your advantage.
You can analyze the data to offer real estate services or make informed investment decisions.
What is The Best Realtor Scraper?
There are many sophisticated realtor scrapers on the internet that extract data from websites efficiently and quickly. They all excel as well as lack in some areas.
It is noted that paid ones usually offer more features and better customer service.
Can You Get in Trouble for Web Scraping?
No, web scraping is legal, and you won’t get in any trouble if you do it the right way. It is usually recommended for start-ups as it helps with market research.
However, it is crucial to mention that extracting confidential information from websites can land you in trouble.
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Written by Jason Wise
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