Web scraping isn’t that complicated, but you won’t make the whole process efficient unless you get the right tools. You need a top-rated web scraper tool, one of which is named Python, just as an example.
In layman’s terms, web scraping is very similar to the copy-pasting we perform daily. If you’ve ever used this functionality, you’ve done your fair share of web scraping. However, when used manually, the copy-paste tool takes up a lot of time and tends to have errors made by humans.
This manual copy-pasting then collects inaccurate and unreliable data, which can’t give you good insights. That’s precisely where web scrapers step in. Web scrapers are all about extracting and storing data from websites.
Numerous businesses, real estate being one of them, collect valuable data this way and can make data-driven decisions as a result. Web scrapers are the ones that allow you to gain only worthy insights and accurate data that come in a readable format.
Let’s dig a little deeper into web scraping, web scrapers, and how industries use them, especially the real estate industry.
Defining web scraping
The term “web scraping” refers to gathering, organizing, and storing significant amounts of web data in one place. All data which is public is available on the internet for all. Numerous web scraping programs visit pages on the internet automatically and collect resourceful data.
Also, these programs organize the data logically and store them in one designated place. This way, web scraping gives you access to information that you, later on, use for your purposes. Web scraping is mostly used for:
- Observation of weather data – analyzing data to use it for development of particular research;
- Gathering contact information – this includes collecting, say, email addresses to promote a product;
- Price monitoring – to track all the changes in prices of your competitors;
- Business – tracking trends and news, automating a business, monitoring brands, recruitment, and job listings;
- Real estate – we’ll delve into this further in the text, but in real estate, web scraping is mainly used for tracking current real estate offer and changes in their prices;
Processes behind scraping
Once you use a web scraping tool to sift through websites and collect data from their web pages, you must consider using proxies for web scraping. Many people use US proxy to tackle the geo-blocking technologies many websites have.
Websites use these geo-restrictions to slow down your web scraping process and prevent particular countries from viewing and collecting content from them. Therefore, your initial step should be boosting yourself with a proxy server, such as the US proxy, to bypass these blockings.
With a web scraper, you’ll get a web crawler – a bot that searches for necessary data and guides the web scraper. The web crawler can also follow specific URLs and explore them faster than manual exploring would.
Industries that use scraping
The nine most prominent industries that use web scraping are:
- Media – for discovering trending topics and collecting comments from social media;
- E-commerce – to collect information about competitors and to monitor their prices to create strategies on how to compete against them;
- Website creation – for finding information and articles about competing websites to boost their own;
- Tourism – for discovering the hottest destinations and making traveling plans;
- Law – finding information about past cases;
- Lead generation – to scrap profiles of customers;
- Research – research companies need to scrape data to prove their hypotheses or support their models;
- Finance – data about investors’ money;
- Real estate – to collect data on customers’ phone numbers, email addresses, and profiles;
How to use web scraping in real estate
Real estate and web scraping are like a match made in heaven. Scraping helps real estate companies gather credible and precise real estate info. It’s done by scraping listings from the internet through a service provider for data extraction.
Scraping these metrics allows the realtor to explore them further and assess future customers and sales – which is what real estate is all about. Using web scraping in real estate enables the following:
- Property agents and types;
- The price of a sale;
- Location, size, and amenities;
- Parking spaces;
- The monthly cost for rent;
With all this information at hand, a realtor can communicate to customers more efficiently, make smarter decisions, and sell more profitably in the fastest possible way.
Conclusion
Web scraping is excellent for businesses that wish to collect and analyze essential data. Web scrapers help firms in this field and are essentially scalable, flexible, and easy to use
They are the ones that help beat the competition easily, improve the experiences of customers, and generate more return on investment. Finding the right web scraping tool is the first step to take. So, pick the proper scraper based on the volume of your project and find a reliable vendor for it.
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