Are you interested in the real estate and home data publicly available on the Zillow website? With Zillow Scrapers, you can extract them automatically. Come in now to discover the best Zillow Scrapers in the market.
E-commerce is dealing a big blow to traditional businesses and disrupting it. Zillow is one of the e-commerce platforms or simply, a marketplace for real estate and home rental services that have dealt a blow to the real estate industry – and has disrupted it. According to data available, Zillow is one of the leading home rental and real estate marketplace in the market.
It is quite popular and had turned into a place where real estate buyers and agents met. Zillow has, in a way, assert itself as an authority that even real estate analysts and researchers cannot do without it. Researchers and analysts are interested in the publicly available data on the website.
Unlike many other websites, Zillow provides an API that is completely free, and you can use it to scrape some of the interesting data points you have interest in. However, just like most APIs, the Zillow APIs come with some restrictions that make their APIs useless to most use cases. If you must have access to the data on Zillow in bulk without paying them, then you must do so using automated scraping tools known as Zillow Scrapers.
However, Zillow is not a pushover when it comes to aggressively fighting scraping. Even with its anti-scraping systems in place, you can still walk around them and get your hands on the required data.
In this article, I will be recommending the best Zillow Scrapers in the market for you to use. Before that, let take a look at an overview of Zillow scraping and how you can do that yourself as a coder.
Zillow Scraping – an Overview
Web scraping is the process of using computer programs to automate extracting data from websites. The process is generally the same regardless of the website in question. However, each website has some peculiarities that could either make them easy to be scraped or frustrate you when you attempt to scrape it. Zillow does not support scraping it publicly available data using scrapers.
Because of this, it provides some APIs such as the Home Valuation API, and the Property Details API tailored toward developers to integrate into their programs. The APIs can be very limiting, especially in the area of the number of requests you can send per day, which is limited to just 1000 for each of the APIs.
Not only the request limit, the APIs all together are useless when you need to gather data in bulk for research. While they provide users a free API that can’t be used for scraping, they made scraping very difficult for web scrapers. In fact, you need to be experienced to be able to scrape Zillow on any reasonable scale. This is because Zillow has put in place some anti-scraping techniques that do not make only scraping difficult – but also any form of automation.
If you are going to be scraping Zillow, then you need to know that Zillow makes use of commercially reasonable efforts to prevent data from being scraped from their website. They make use of techniques such as Captcha, honeypot trap, IP analysis, velocity checks, and other undisclosed in-house techniques to protect their data against scraping.
For you to scrape Zillow data, then you need to circumvent all of these anti-scraping techniques. Experienced scrapers can circumvent them without much hassle. But for newbies, it is going to be a lot of work that making use of already-made Zillow Scrapers will be the best option.
How to Scrape Zillow Using Python, Requests, and Beautifulsoup
This section of the article is for those with a coding skill who will want to develop a Zillow Scraper to meet their specific requirement. If you do not have a coding skill, skip this section and go to the next section, where I provided recommendations on the best Zillow Scrapers. With coding skills and experience in scraping, you can develop your own custom scraper to extract data from the Zillow website.
There’s no specific programming language. Provided it is a full programming language, and you can use it for network programming, and handling HTML files. However, Python is the most popular programming language for coding scrapers. And that’s what will be used in this section.
Python has some pretty libraries and frameworks that make building web scrapers easy. For this scraping Zillow, you will need the duo of Requests and Beautifulsoup. Requests will be used for sending HTTP requests to download the HTML of your page of interest. Beautifulsoup is used for parsing and extracting out the required data. With these two installed, you are equipped.
However, you still have to think of the ways to circumvent the anti-bot checks of Zillow – remember, they have systems in place to prevent automated access. For the IP tracking and analysis, using residential high rotating proxies will work – if you do not want to deal with proxy management, proxy APIs are the option for you. Even with the use of proxies, Captchas will still appear. You will need a Captcha solver at some points.
It is important you note that without sending headers and mimicking a popular browser, you won’t be able to access Zillow. There are also a good number of things you have to plan for, but this is in the case of when you are building a complex scraper.
As for a simple scraper, you just have to take care of proxies, Captchas, and headers. Below is an example of a simple web scraper that extracts details of listed houses in LA. Because it is a proof of concept, there’s no support for Captchas and proxies. When building yours for a real case scenario, you have to include Captcha solver and proxies support.
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
class ZillowScraper:
def __init__(self):
self.url = "https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Los-Angeles-
CA_rb/?fromHomePage=true&shouldFireSellPageImplicitClaimGA=false&fromHomePageTab=buy"
self.properties = []
def scrape_properties(self):
headers = {
'accept':
'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8',
'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br',
'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
'upgrade-insecure-requests': '1',
'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36'
}
content = requests.get(self.url, headers=headers)
soup = BeautifulSoup(content.text, "html.parser")
properties = soup.find("ul", {"class": "photo-cards photo-cards_wow photo-
cards_short"}).find_all("li")
for e in properties:
price = e.find("article").find("div", {"class": "list-card-price"}).text
address = e.find("article").find("div", {"class": "list-card-addr"}).text
self.properties.append([price, address])
print(self.properties)
x = ZillowScraper()
x.scrape_properties()
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Best Zillow Scrapers in the Market
For non-coders or coders that do not want to go through the hassle of building their own Zillow scraper, there are some Zillow scrapers you can use in the market. Most of these scrapers are not Zillow specialized scrapers but generic scrapers with support for Zillow. Some of the scrapers are discussed below.
Octoparse
- Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
- Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, SQLServer
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
Octoparse is one of the best web scraping tools you can use for extracting the publicly available data from Zillow web pages. One thing you will come to like about Zillow is that it is easy to use and you – thanks to its point and click interface. With Octoparse, you will not have the need to have coding skills. Octoparse is available as an installable application and also has a cloud-based platform.
Octoparse has some advanced web scraping features that make it perfect for dealing with all kinds of websites. If you do not want to make use of their application, you can even pay for their professional data service, and they will provide you the Zillow data you are interested in.
Apify’s Zillow API Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at $49 per month
- Free Trials: Fully functional free account with $5 credit every month
- Data Output Format: JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML, RSS
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
The Apify Zillow Scraper is based on the Zillow API, but there are no limits on how much data you can download. This ready-made Zillow scraping tool lets you start your search using keywords or URLs and will then go on to extract and save all data on the property listings found. The scraper lets you download the full address, including latitude and longitude, price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the size of the living area, photos, date of listing, description, videos, and more.
Apify includes its own proxy service, with intelligently rotating residential and data center proxies designed to make it easy to scrape Zillow and other popular sites.
ScrapeStorm
- Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per month
- Free Trials: Starter plan is free – comes with limitations
- Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
- Supported Platforms:Desktop
Another Zillow scraper that you will find useful in gathering the required data for your real estate research is ScrapeStorm. ScrapeStorm was built by an ex-Google crawler team. Scraping Zillow using ScrapeStorm is completely a visual operation, and it is easy. ScrapeStorm comes with an intelligent data identification system that keeps manual operation at the barest minimum.
It automatically identifies key data points. This is all possible as the tool is AI-powered. It has support for multiple data export methods and supports a good number of system platforms.
Zillow Real Estate Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at $49 per month for 100 Actor compute units
- Free Trials: Starter plan comes with 10 Actor compute units
- Data Output Format: JSON
- Supported OS: cloud-based – accessed via API
The Zillow Real Estate Scraper is a developer-focused Zillow scraper. It is available on the Apify platform. This tool makes use of the internal API of Zillow to provide you access to the listed properties on Zillow for sale or rent. You can use it to search for homes in any location and scrape details of each of the homes returned. While it is meant for running on the Apify platform, it can also run locally. As I stated earlier, it is meant for developers, and you can integrate it into your code.
WebHarvy
- Pricing: Starts at $139 for a single user license
- Free Trials: Not available
- Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, XML. TSV, etc.
- Supported Platforms: Desktop
Just like every other Zillow scraper discussed, WebHarvy is a paid tool. It is also a generic web scraper but can be used for scraping Zillow data. Zillow comes with an intelligent pattern detection system that automatically identifies patterns occurring in web pages.
It is a visual scraping tool and requires no coding skills. What is required is using the point and click interface for training it on the data to be scrapped. WebHarvy even has support for Regular Expression (Regex) and can even help out with extracting real estate images.
ParseHub
- Pricing: Starts at $149 per month
- Free Trials: Desktop version is free with some limitations
- Data Output Format: Excel, JSON
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
If you are on a low budget or looking to scrape without paying as you could in the above tools, then ParseHub is the tool for you. Its desktop application is free to use and comes with some forms of restriction. However, to remove all the restrictions, pay for a subscription, and you can even make use of their cloud-based scraper.
ParseHub is incredibly flexible and powerful. Interestingly, it is also easy to use – thanks to its point and click interface. ParseHub even comes with a REST API for downloading data. With ParseHub, you can even schedule your scraping tasks.
Conclusion
As a way of concluding this article, I need to let you know that scraping Zillow is completely unethical. While it can be legal, some technicalities can also make it illegal. You need to find out from a lawyer if the peculiarity of your own use case does not make it illegal. If it does not, and you want to overlook the moral aspects, then using one of the Zillow scrapers will help you out.
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