Zillow platform is a website designed to ensure an enhanced user experience for renters, buyers, and sellers of real estate at every stage of the deal. They empower people with information so they can find the best home.
The website contains an enormous amount of real estate information that can be of great interest to real estate professionals and users searching for a place to move.
Benefits of real estate data scraping
There are many reasons, why real estate professionals, investors, and homeowners want to scrape Zillow data, the US largest real estate platform:
- Analysis of property pricing. Realt estate prices are determined by the rule of supply and demand and by many factors related to the property characteristics. To make an informed decision about the true cost of a property item, to find an under- or overestimated items, to understand, if you can increase the property price, a real estate agent or a homeowner have to look through thousands of posts, which is an extremely time-consuming process. Web-scraping can save the day by reducing efforts and time spent by order of magnitude.
- Outreach. It isn’t really feasible to sort through thousands of property items, though this is what resellers and potential buyers need to make the best decision possible. Web-scraping will help them: not only they will manage to cover all offers meeting their requirements, but the deliverables can take a user-friendly form of a spreadsheet, CSV or database file.
- Keeping a finger on the pulse. Lucrative offers don’t last. Running through new posts manually every day just in hope of not missing the best offer of the day would paralyze the entire life or would require hiring a team of full-time employees. In this case, regular web-scraping helps not to miss the great opportunity with minimum time and efforts spent.
Can You Scrape Zillow Data
Scraping Zillow data is absolutely allowed. Zillow Group provides almost 20 APIs related to various Real Estate aspects, including:
- Agents Reviews API to manage reviews on Zillow listings;
- Mortgage APIs to deliver current rates, lender reviews, and other technical details related to mortgages;
- Public APIs for data aggregation neighborhood parameters and real estate metrics;
- Broker Listings API that enable access to performance reporting, direct-to-Zillow feed of listing photos and videos, and review management.
And this is not an exhaustive list.
What Zillow Data Can I Extract Using This Tool?
With the right approach in place, you can scrape data from Zillow. You can access vast amounts of different kinds of information, including:
- full address;
- property cost;
- property characteristics, descriptions and images;
- number of rooms and bathrooms, and the area of the property in square meters;
- post date, for how long information was placed on the website, how many views and saves the property has gained.
Besides, you can scrape entire listings of property items grouped by a city, area, ZIP code, etc. and details about property agents, including their phone numbers, names and companies they work for. Keep in mind that most of these options will require you to use special proxies for web scraping or other tools like proxies in Scrapy or the rotating option there.
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How to Scrape Zillow Without Coding
The great interwebs offer abundant ways to scrape Zillow with zero-code tools. New scraping software is created virtually every day, but we’ve made a review of popular user-friendly crawlers. Many of the solutions offered take the form of the Google Chrome extension, which additionally simplifies and enhances user experience.
Bardeen’s Scraper. It’s an AI-based connector that effortlessly creates automations upon user’s requests. This workflow automation tool supports a visual website data collection and is available as a Google Chrome extension.
With Bardeen’s, you can extract detailed information from every property page or search results, save details of Zillow property to Notion or Coda, make a file with Zillow listings in Google Sheets, retrieve and save Zillow agents data to a separate Google Sheets file, all virtually with a click of a mouse.
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APISCRAPY’s AI-Driven Zillow Scraper. It’s a no-code tool that extracts data by means of Zillow API. To work with it, you need to install the app, create an account and download the Beautiful Soup and Requests libraries.
How APISCRAPY Zillow Scraper works:
1. It sends a GET request to Zillow through the Requests library;
2. Retrieves the HTML content according to the submitted request;
3. Parses the HTML Content with the help of Beautiful Soup or lxml;
4. Saves the extracted data in a database or CSV file.
It can retrieve the following Zillow information:
- Property details, including its type, location, size, number of rooms, and so on;
- Current and historical price, as well as price dynamics;
- Property images;
- Listing details, such as date, when the property was posted or sold;
- Property characteristics, such as details about technical features of the property.
Zillow Real–Estate Agents Scraper is a free, no-code, ready-to-use real estate agent scraper designed specifically to retrieve contacts of real estate agents from Zillow. After creating a free account, just click <Activate> to link PDE with the account; enter required URLs that are either property pages or search results, and click <Run now>. The retrieved data can be saved in CSV, XML, XLSX or JSON.
Another Chrome extension is Axiom. With its help, users can create their own bots or employ the offered templates; automate clicking and typing in Zillow; launch bots manually, schedule their operation or use Zapier integrations not to miss external events that are important for obtaining new data.
Zillow Extractor Elite also offered as Chrome extension downloads detailed property listings in CSV or Excel.
After all, users, who are unwilling to dig into Chrome extensions or any other scraping software have another solution to rely on: they can just buy Zillow datasets. There are companies that offer accurate Zillow data in JSON or CSV formats from any geolocation.
Zillow Web Scraping with Python
If you can write code in Python or Ruby, you won’t really need ready-to-use tools — you can create your own utility that perfectly matches your requirements.
There are plenty of recipes across the web. Most developers suggest using Python libraries and frameworks, including BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Python Requests, Python LXML, etc.
General recommendations on scraping Zillow advise installing Python 3 and Pip.
The overall scraping process is divided into five main steps:
- Search the data you need. For example, you can search Zillow by city, district, address, ZIP code.
- Get the URL with search results.
- Use Python Requests to download HTML code.
- Use LXML to parse the page.
- Export the retrieved data to a CSV file.
In particular, the script developed to crawl Zillow based on a ZIP code may look as follows:
However, to bypass anti-scraping captchas-based Zillow protection, it’s necessary to add headers to the request function when you deploy a request.get(url) function. If you plan at-scale scraping, it’s better to entrench yourself by using reliable proxies that will help avoid bans.
This is how a Zillow scraping script with Request and Pandas looks like:
And this is a Zillow scraping script made with HTTPX, an HTTP client for Python: 
Conclusion
Zillow is an endless real estate universe you get lost in. Not to get drowned, many homeowners and real estate professionals recourse to web-scraping capabilities. Depending on their requirements, they can choose between ready-to-use scrapers, delivered datasets and Python-based customized solutions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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Is it legal to scrape Zillow?
Yes. Zillow Group itself offers a variety of API enabling access to multiple groups of data it operates.
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Can you find property listings from different countries on Zillow?
No, Zillow is US-only real-estate platform.
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Is it better to use datacenter or residential proxies when scraping Zillow?
For this use case, residential proxies, especially static residential proxies, suit better than datacenter proxies, since they ensure you can access Zillow listings from different geolocations. The advantage of rotating residential proxies is that they allow send multiple requests without the risk of detection or ban by Zillow.
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At Private Proxy, you can purchase a residential type of proxy with IP addresses that belong to real households. This IP is assigned by the regular ISPs, so in the end, your address will look completely legitimate and clean. In this guide, we will talk about all of the basic settings and learn how to use residential proxies.