If you are familiar with real estate in the United States and Canada, you must know about Realtor.com. For people involved in the industry or looking for properties, it provides a wide range of tools and resources. This article will give you a brief introduction to this platform and walk you through the steps of scraping Realtor.com data without coding.
Why Scrape Realtor.com
What is Realtor.com
Realtor.com was founded as a closed network for members of the National Association of Realtor (NAR) and relaunched in 1996 as a public website displaying property listings. Since then, it has asserted its position as the biggest real estate website in the US. As of 2021, it is also the second-most popular real estate listing website in this nation, while the most popular is Zillow.
Now NAR is the largest trade association for real estate professionals and represents over 1.4 million members, including agents, brokers, and appraisers. And Realtor.com, because of the strong partnership with NAR, is the only real state website that has direct access to NAR’s database, Realtor.com can provide accurate and up-to-date information on homes for sale across the country.
What data you can grab from Realtor
Information on Realtor.com covers almost every detail about renting or buying homes. Users can even look for an agent, team, or company based on the needs that help them handle every step of buying and selling homes.
You may quickly browse through every house on the listing page if you’re looking to rent or sell a property. On this sort of page, basic details like the property’s type, price, square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and address are accessible and extractable. The information is more detailed when you visit a home’s detail page. In addition to the information displayed on the listing page, you can access other property features like interior features, heating & cooling, land info, school information, construction info, monthly payment, etc.
Meanwhile, Realtor.com is a great place to search for agents. You can look up agents based on where they are, and Realtor.com will provide you with a list of those agents. In this list, you may find information about them like their names, phone numbers, the number of homes they have sold under their names, etc. To discover more about an agent from many perspectives, you can access more thorough information on their profile, such as their social media accounts, professional experiences, served regions, specializations, listings of selling houses, ratings, and reviews. And, of course, all this information is ready for web scraping.
How can Realtor.com data help
On Realtor.com, tens of thousands of homes are available for viewing. Whether you’re looking for the ideal home or developing a plan to sell residences in North America, information from Realtor.com is always valuable as a resource. You can apply data from this platform for several potential uses, each of which will help you make better real estate investments or stay ahead in the industry. Here are two examples of how you can benefit from Realtor.com data.
Price Monitoring
The real estate market is ever-changing. Tracking prices on Realtor.com can be valuable for real estate professionals, investors, and home buyers. It involves monitoring changes in home prices for specific properties or neighborhoods over time. This data can help real estate professionals like agents to price selling houses at a competitive and reasonable level. And for investors and buyers who are looking to purchase a property at the best possible price, this data is necessary to make the final decisions.
Lead Generation
Real estate lead generation is the process of finding people who are interested in buying or selling a property and contacting them with pertinent information or offers. Realtor.com offers a variety of details, such as property specifics, pricing, and location information, on homes for sale or rent. Professionals can apply web scraping to this platform to identify potential leads and reach out to them, then gather more information about the property or make an offer.
Scrape Property Data from Realtor.com Without Coding
Today, users can easily and efficiently scrape data from websites with the help of web scraping tools. Octoparse is an easy-to-use scraping tool that anyone can use, regardless of coding skills. With only four steps, you can also grab information from Realtor.com like a pro, even if you have zero experience in writing code.
If you have not used Octoparse before, please download and install the software to your local device first. When you first open the software, you must have an account to log in. You can sign up for a free account. This account will give you access to many powerful features on Octoparse. Then, you can start your web scraping journey by following the steps below!
Step 1: Enter the URL and create a new task
When you have a page that you want to pull data from, copy the URL of this page and paste it into the Octoparse search bar. Next, click on Start to create a new task. Octoparse has a built-in browser that will load the page in seconds. Please wait until the page finishes loading before moving to the next step.
Step 2: Auto-detect page data
Once the page has finished loading, click “Auto-detect webpage data” in the Tips panel. Within one click, Octoparse will automatically scan the entire page and “guess” what data you’re looking for. Meanwhile, Octoparse will highlight all the extractable and detected data on the built-in browser for you to preview easily. If there is any unwanted data, you can remove these data fields in the Data Preview panel at the bottom. You can also rename fields on this panel.
Step 3: Create a workflow
After selecting all the desired data fields, click “Create workflow”. A diagram will then appear on the right side. Here is how this scraper works, step by step. To understand how it works, you can read it from top to bottom, from inside to outside if there are any nested actions. You can get a preview and verify that the scraper functions as expected by clicking on each action.
Step 4: Run the task and export scraped data
Click “Run” to launch the scraper once you’ve verified all the details! Now Octoparse offers two options for running tasks. When you need task troubleshooting or are working on a small job, running it on your device will be more convenient. By contrast, Octoparse’s cloud servers are ideal for handling large tasks or for scraping data on a regular basis.
Pick one based on your needs, and then Octoparse will take care of the rest. After the scraping process is completed, you can export data as an Excel, CSV, or JSON file, or a database like Google Sheets for further use.
Wrap-up
Realtor.com provides a wide range of information in the area of real estate. This article has introduced what information you can get on this site and how you can grab data from it. However, data on this platform only covers properties in North America. Alternatively, if you are interested in markets in other regions, you can follow the steps outlined in this article.
