Get your real estate business organized with Listly

Let’s be honest, data collection is tedious and time consuming. If you are a real estate agent, then you already know up-to-date information is essential to your success. You are probably no stranger to spending hours every day gathering gobs of data from different sources to create lists of properties for your clients, or scraping listings from websites to update your Facebook feeds with new information about homes to sell. You definitely feel frustrated while you compile a list of emails from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to follow up on possible leads.

Tackling these menial tasks can seem daunting at first glance. However, thanks to productivity tools such as web rippers, and list crawlers, these tedious jobs can become easier through automation features that include scheduling of such chores. In turn, you will save time without sacrificing quality, and be able to focus on what matters – identifying market trends, and staying ahead of your competition so you are growing your business.

There are many tools to help with your data collection, but which service is the right for you? That depends on your needs and budget. To help your decision-making process, the best way is to try them for yourself. Let’s talk briefly about some of these services to highlight their features.

If you are looking for a simple and easy-to-use web scraping service that offers plenty of features for the money, then Listly.io is a great option. Here are some of the features they offer:

Free Chrome extension that allows quick access.
Up to 100 URLs per month and unlimited one-page extractions on the free version. If you need more, the paid version will provide more features for your money.
Convert property listings from a site like Zillow to a spreadsheet in seconds.
Auto-scroll, and auto-clicks helps to load more data without having to physically scroll or click.
Group feature allows you to add a list of URLs and collect data from all of them.

Next up is Octoparse. This service requires you to download and install a software application, which includes some of the following features:

Free plan is great if you need to extract a small number of records (up to 10k), but it may not meet your needs when scraping larger datasets. You may apply for a free trial on the paid tiers to try the premium options.
Software provides plenty of templates to build extracting jobs to suit your needs.
Option to schedule long scraping jobs to execute in the cloud (paid version) so that you are not using your computer resources.
API access to integrate data delivery straight to your databases or system.
Auto IP rotation to avoid being blocked by the websites you scrape regularly.

Parsehub is another option for you to explore. This one is the most expensive of the three we discussed. Similar to Octoparse, they also require you to download a client install. Here are the highlights for their product:

Free version gives you 200 pages, but you might as well be ready to wait because it takes 40 minutes to render your results.
Interface is comprised of panels that allow you to choose a site, the fields you want to extract, and pre-format the output in the same screen.
There is data retention limits even on the paid plans, whereas the prior services did not mention this being an issue.

While all three of these scrapers have distinct advantages and disadvantages, they all provide a quick and easy method to extract information from the web and potentially save you time. Before you choose a scraping service, try out the different options so that when you have to make a decision, you can make an informed choice based on your needs.