Table of Contents
Introduction
The real estate market is one of the most dynamic fields, where data
scraping plays a major role not only for real estate business owners and
agencies but also for regular customers. When we need to make
the decision regarding buying or renting properties, the first thing we should
do is a comparative analysis based on price, type of house, its size,
location, etc.
Therefore, we’re going to scrape the leading real estate marketplace
called Zillow. There are several paid Zillow data scrapers in the market
that you can buy and use, but in this article, we are going to scrape
Zillow with the help of Python. So, if you have some coding skills and do
not want to pay the extra money, let’s move forward to learn how to
download data from Zillow.
Why Choose Python
As we’ve mentioned above, if you have some coding skills and a bit of knowledge about web scraping, then you can develop your Zillow data scraper to extract the required data from Zillow. You can use any programming language to handle HTML files, but Python is widely used for developing scrapers. Some facts:
Scraping Zillow Using Python and LXML
Python tools you will need
For scraping Zillow with Python, it is required to have Python 3 and Pip installed. Follow the instructions below for the purpose As we are using Python 3, it is also required to install the following packages for downloading and parsing the HTML code. Here are the package requirements:Common steps
We are going to search and scrape Zillow data based on a specific postal code: 02128.
The whole scraping process contains the following steps:
- Conduct a search on Zillow by inserting the postal code.
- Get the search results URL https://www.zillow.com/homes/02128_rb/.
- Download HTML code through Python Requests.
- Parse the page through LXML.
- Export the extracted data to a CSV file.
Running the Zillow data scraper
Let’s name the script zillow.py that will be used for the script name in a command line.
So, to get the newest listings, we should run an appropriate script to
sort the relevant arguments for the specific zip code.
In the final step, a CSV file will be created in the same folder as the
script.
Scrape Zillow Using Python and BeautifulSoup
In this part, we’ll just go through some useful insights that you can use while scraping Zillow.Required libraries
For BeautifulSoup you need to install the required libraries, which can be done through the requirements.txt file. Just input the complete list in the file and run the pip install requirements.txt file.
Bypassing captchas
Like many websites, Zillow also throws captchas. That’s why while deploying a request.get(url) function, it is required to add headers to the request function. See the below example:
Looping through URLs
To create variables, there are many ways to loop through URLs. Let’s try the simplest one. So, if you are planning to extract 5 pages’ data, you can create 5 soup variables and give them a unique title as in the below example.
Formatting data
To make the extracted data more readable, just make some formatting jobs. So, we are going to:
