How to Get Leads from Craigslist | Browse AI
In this video, I'm going to give you a step by step guide to get Craigslist for sale by owner listings in any city. We will use web scraping with absolutely no code.
Ariel Herrera 0:00
How to get a list of for sale by owner properties from Craigslist for sale by owner homes are sold by the homeowner without the help of a listing agent or broker. This can benefit a homebuyer by having direct communication with the seller for wholesalers and real estate agents for sale by owner can be used as leads for motivated sellers. We can get this information from sites like Craigslist, but what if we want to get this data into a list or Excel file? Well in this video, I'm going to give you a step by step guide to get Craigslist for sale by owner listings in any city. We will use web scraping with absolutely no code. My name is Ariel Herrera, your fellow data scientists with the analytics aerial channel where we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. I am passionate about providing data solutions. So follow my channel to get the latest content of real estate analytics. And stay tuned to the end where I provide you tips and other creative strategies for finding motivated sellers. All right, let's get started.
In our last video we were looking for for sale by owner properties based off of Zillow, we were looking for these property owners and we got the data into a list using Browse AI. Now in this use case, we're going to look for for sale by owners from Craigslist. Craigslist is a free site that allows people to buy and sell goods. This also can include real estate. I've actually known of friends who've gotten roommates through Craigslist as well. So it is still highly used. And depending on your market may be used over then Zillow or Facebook marketplace. So in this case, I'm on Craigslist. And the way I got here was by going to Google and searching Tampa, Florida housing, Tampa, Florida housing Craigslist, and I selected the first link here. Next, it takes me to apartments housing for rent, I could use this to find property owners like landlords that may be tired and maybe willing to actually sell their property. But in this use case, we're going to look for motivated sellers already. So when I dropped down here, I'm going to select real estate by owner. Now I'm going to see a view of all listings that are for sale by owner. And sometimes I am going to see duplicates, if the owner has posted it multiple times for our use case, I'm going to filter down only on properties that are between 100,000 to 500,000. This is going to reduce the number of mobile homes that we see as well. So on the left hand side, I'm going to input my parameters.
Once I input my parameters, I could see several properties that are for sale by owner heads up, a lot of them are going to be distressed. So if you're looking to use a burr method, or looking to flip a property, or find something that you can maybe wholesale to another investor, this could be a really great list to use to find motivated sellers with homes that need some work and tender loving care. How do we actually get this information into a spreadsheet so that we can evaluate which deals we want to act on? Well, we're going to use a browser API to do so what is browser API browser API is a web automation software that learns to perform data extraction, monitoring and automation tasks on the web. Simply by observing someone perform the actions just once. Browse, I record your actions as you move through a web page. It can scrape many sites including social media, county information, real estate websites and more. Browse AI has a free amount of credits per month, use the link below to receive a 10% off if you later sign up for a plan. Here, I will click login. Since I already have an account at the Browse AI homepage, you can go over to browse pre built robots browsI. I already has a select amount of robots that are pre trained and make it super easy for you to be able to create your bot. If we go down just a bit, we can see extract Craigslist search results page. This is going to allow us to download our data into a spreadsheet or send the data to Google Sheets or air table we get a brief overview of what this bot is and will always need to do is just provide two inputs, what is our URL? What's our website we want to get data from and the number of listings that we want to obtain. We are going to get back the image, the date, the title and the link. So let's select use this automation. Next we're going to enter in an origin URL. So if we go back to Craigslist, we can copy the URL up top right click select Copy and then we can Go back into our bot. And we can paste the URL. For max results, I want to see actually more as many properties as I can so more data. Here, I'm going to put my max results to 250. Just be aware if you're on a free plan, or if you're on a tear plan, what your limitations are, I'm going to select next. The second step and final is just to review our bot, we are going to set our bot up to go get information from this website and return to us Max 250 rows. Once satisfied, we can click start extracting our robot is now being set up, it's going to follow similar tasks to what we did when we searched Tampa, Florida we went in, we have our search, and it's going to go through each of the listings to return us data. And one of the benefits here is that this is being all done in the cloud, we don't have to run any code on our machine. And we don't have to have any processes working on our machine that would force us to keep our desktop awake. Once complete, we could see all the listings within one spot. Here's a table we could see the image link date that it was posted title, as well as the length of the actual post. So let's click this here. And we could see it this is our for sale by owner property. It's about 200,003 bedrooms, 1500 square feet, and it's located on 100 Hampton road, we could see more information. And we could also get the contact information to contact the owner directly. This is a great lead. If we want to look for motivated sellers. We can also download this as a CSV file. But what if we want to take it a step further in terms of automation? Well, we can go over to monitor if we want, we can add a new monitor so we could set maybe every single day that we go have our web scraper check to see if there's any new for sale by owner listings. If so, we could then integrate it with Google Sheets Zapier or a REST API where we get this data, perhaps analyze the deal automatically, and then automatically send an SMS which is a text message. This can allow us to be the first ones to contact for sale by owner properties and thus finding motivated sellers. Now a bonus tip to find motivated sellers, not just for sale by owner, but we could look for those that have apartments or housing for rent. In this view, we
could look at properties that are currently listed for rent by the property owner. If we go down, we could look at properties, say like this one. And we could actually contact the owner directly and say, Hey, I know your property is up for rent. But I'm actually in the market and available to purchase this property. Would you be willing to strike a deal? This can help you find sellers off market and thus get you a great deal. Please leave comments below on what you think about finding for sale by owner lists and maybe other strategies that you have to get creative list. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to get the latest tips on real estate data analytics. Thanks
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