How to Download Property Listings Data
In this video, we're going to get property listings for search automatically using the analytics area of property listings and details tool.
Ariel Herrera 0:00
It's crazy to say, but I've been a real estate data geek for four years now. And I've gone through my mistakes as most people do. But as of the last three years, I've been able to grow my real estate business and impact hundreds of students or online programs. My mission with this channel is to simply define success for you, and ideally help you avoid a lot of the mistakes that I made. And so I want to help you to build a data driven business that you can scale with automation. And if that's exciting for you, be sure to hit the like button so we can reach more people. And be sure to subscribe because we put new videos every single week. So taking it back to when I started getting properties in 2019. low cost options were few and far between to obtain property data, I didn't want to pay for MLS data just to analyze my mini market. I also didn't want to create a web scraper from scratch, since by the time I would complete it, there could be potential deals that would be gone. I was feeling overwhelmed, confused and put sembly loss on what the next steps would be. This is where I stumbled on API's that already do web scraping for you and provide the data at a low cost and structured way. So let's jump into how we can get property listings without a single line of code. In this video, we're going to get property listings for search automatically using the analytics area of property listings and details tool. How it's going to work, you'll be able to take your specific search from Zillow, and copy it into the app. Once you enter in your relevant info, the data will be retrieved. You can then come to the analytics tab to analyze your data and even download it. In the analytics tab you'll see summary stats like average sale price, average estimate value, and even average estimate rent value. There are visualizations to easily understand the scope of your dataset. This includes charts like box plots and histograms. Towards the bottom, you can see a map of where the properties are, as well as download the data. The data download has property attributes, including beds, baths, sale price, and even the Zestimate value. Let's now walk through step by step on how to get started by using the property search and detail tool. So first, you're going to use a link below or go to analytics aerial.com. Locate the tool website, then calm to sign up. There are just two steps to sign up and you only have to do it once. So first is signing up for free API key for scrape peek, you can click the link. And here you will be on a Zillow scraper. So if you're new to API's, API's basically provide you a way to gather structured data. So instead of us having to go to Zillow, and looking for property details and copying everything one by one into a spreadsheet. This can be automatically done with a programming language like Python, and structures so that others could use this data and query it in a similar fashion. So this particular API is created by scrape peek, they have several real estate scrapers, including even getting information on deeds. Particularly we're focusing on the Zillow scraper which gets US and Canada real estate data. You could search for millions of for sale and rental listings by state, address, neighborhood, city or even zip code. To get started, click on the right hand side try for free. Here you will either log into your account if you already have one, or you will click Sign Up, enter your relevant information and then click sign up. Once you sign up, you will see your dashboard, you will go over to plans and you will select the starter plan. This will allow you to query data for free, you will have 1000 credits per month, which equates to 100 Free searches. This is amazing for those who are looking to get information for their particular market. You will then come to Account Settings. Here will see your information that you entered your current plan, how many credits you've used, and most importantly, your API key. your API key will allow you to access the information. Once you locate your API key, copy it down as we are going to use it and the property details and listings app. Next you're going to come to Zillow and you're going to search based on your criteria. So in my case, I have a buy and hold real estate investor. So I look for properties that are about three to four bedrooms and in particular market for me Tampa, Florida. So here I'm going to enter Tampa, Florida I'm going to see all listings. There are about 1300 results, as you can see from the top left hand corner, but I don't care about every single property. So particularly I focus on single family homes, they're typically easier to rent and have low costs, like not having an HOA that a condo does. And a co op typically has a lot of rules as well. So once I filter on houses, I see now I've gone down to 777 results. But of course, we want to be as granular as possible. So here, I'm going to filter on my range, I'm looking for properties between 200,000. And let's say 500,000. For beds and baths, I want at least three bedrooms, and I can click apply, then what I find very important is square footage, I want to make sure that there may be opportunity to add a bedroom and a bathroom if possible. And there's enough comfortable space for say, three to four adults to live on the property. So I'm going to put 1500 square feet and click Apply. Now I see my listings have gone down even more to 108 currently for sale homes. Now instead of having to copy this information down into a spreadsheet, we will utilize the API to be able to automatically extract this information. So we could go to the top. And we will copy the URL. And we'll bring it into the app. We could save the URL for now, because we still have to sign up for the tool itself. So here I will enter in my information. What's really neat about this tool is that I added a feature that will store the data for 14 days. That way, if you had a search for a couple of days ago, and you want to reference it, you can do so. So click Agree. And then click sign up. Great. Now we can start searching. So let's go to our listing search. And we previously copied our Zillow URL for our search, and we will paste it here. Next, we're going to take the API key that we have from scrape peak and put it into the API key field here. Lastly, enter your email which will allow you to save down the search and then later retrieve it in the analytics tab. When you click run, the information is now being retrieved using your API key. Do not leave the page in order for the data to complete the retrieval process. We see here that the number of properties that were retrieved were 108, which matches up from what we saw in the 100 agent listings. We could then go to the analytics tab to analyze these results. Here I will enter in my email address, and then click Go. There are two options listings and property detail. I'll touch on property detail in more detail on a later video. But for now, we're looking at listing so all the listings that are for sale and are given search, click go. And we'll see the different files that are available. So I've only had one particular search it was today, which is February 19. And this was a unique search ID that was given when the search was complete. Once I select the file, I can now see property metrics, I get information like average sale price, this tells us that what the properties are listed for and my search average should be 408,000, the estimated value. So what we're getting back from the Zestimate is 390 5k. This makes me think that some of the properties are overvalued, at the list price, then we could also see average rent. And we could view some charts as well. So if we want to look at the sales price box, we could see that the median is 405k. With on the lower end being 225k and first quartile 365k. This gives us a good idea of where the data lies. We can also look at two histogram charts for both the estimate value and the rent estimate value as well. We could see that most of the data is centered as well for rent estimate to with some being on the high end. So say if we are buying hold investors, we're looking to assess what the cash flow would be for a property may be really important for us to understand what we can rent the property for, because my search is pretty specific but still really wide and rent its estimate. This tells me there's definitely different pockets within the whole Tampa area that have higher rents versus lower rents. So possibly more refined areas more
a class versus C class. And when you're coming to a new city to try to invest you want to understand those pockets as well as possible. So now Coming more down, we could look at map view. And we could see where these properties lie as well. Then we could look at a preview of our dataset, which has a lot of information. And we can download this into a CSV file. Awesome. Well, I hope this has been useful for you to understand how you could utilize API's even without code to get information without having to build a web scraper from scratch, or even hiring a VA to copy information down manually. It's important for us if we want to scale our real estate businesses to utilize automation as much as possible. If this is the kind of content that you enjoy them. Please don't forget to like this video, and comment below on what city you're searching for. Thanks
Transcribed by https://otter.ai