Online presence is increasingly becoming one of the most important things for any business nowadays. The reason for it is that business markets everywhere are ultra-competitive and if you want your company to succeed in the ocean of companies providing same or similar services you need to have a better and more efficient online presence which is capable of presenting competitive prices, better service, and more reliable information on the specific industry.
In this and many other ways, real estate business is one of the most competitive businesses out there. And it makes a lot of sense really: every region has a considerable number of real estate companies all competing for the valuable place in the market. If your objective is to secure the biggest and juiciest part for your company, you’re going to have to provide the 2 necessary “Q”s: Quality and Quantity of information.
First of all, what information do you need in order to have your real estate company function properly?
- Real estate listing
- Buildings details
- Buyer and seller profiles
- Details on reputable real estate agents
Having all these will ensure you have good quality and quantity of information and help you create your own database on your company’s website. In addition to that, it will also enable your company to make more informed decisions and set your business on the right track.
The other question is “how can you obtain the abovementioned relevant information for your company”?
The easy way will be to start extracting data from the net yourself or to hire a third-party service that will lift the heavy burden from your shoulders. It will serve as a tool for you to boost your business and sales, as well as, enjoy other benefits like having a large, useful data pool that you can utilize to provide high-performance real estate services and solutions for the benefit of your clients.
As we have already covered previously, web scraping, in general, is the process of collecting information from the internet without the use of repetitive typing or copy-pasting. It is a process through which particular websites are crawled or scraped and important information extracted from them according to predefined parameters. The obtained information is sorted accordingly for later business use. Considering how big any real estate company’s database can be, it is a great time-saving tool.
Having this in mind let’s try to understand the 2 ways data scraping can help you benefit in your real estate business, those are:
1. Gathering up-to-date strategic information
When a real estate company scrapes for information they are looking for specific things and the practice is conducted according to several strategies, like:
- Getting in possession of a large amount of information from the internet
- Gather the information in the preferred format
- Store in an already created database for future use
With the help of scraping real estate businesses are able to deliver information based on certain parameters, such as location, size, prices, reviews, etc. The good thing about web scraping is that even the data points which are located in hard-to-find areas of the internet can easily be scrapped, giving you access to a large information pool that can be the difference-maker for your company. The success of your business is more or less connected with real estate listings you have on your website.
As you cannot risk acquiring outdated information by just buying those lists, web scraping is the perfect choice for you. Property listings gathered with the use of web scraping is a great way to stay updated on the market changes, as the option of getting notified whenever changes happen is available. For instance, when listings get removed, you are notified instantly and can make the relevant changes on your website.
It is also important to remember that in real estate market pictures are essential. People often make decisions based on the quality of the images attached to the listing. With the help of web tools you automatically scan and download image files that meet your specified standards.
2. Scraping agent details from the Internet
With the help of web scraping, it is possible to extract agent details from the internet for the real estate company. It is important and revolutionary because being in possession of lists of real estate agents can really make your business more profitable. In addition to this, you can also scrape agent websites, chat rooms, profiles, communities to get hold of vast amounts of detailed data on real estate agents. This simple action that now takes a couple of hours thanks to web crawlers, used to take years to create and even more to keep up-to-date.
Picture source: Freepik
It’s because scraping is so widely available that a lot of real estate companies have in-house teams for scraping the information they need. Hiring a third-party web scraping service that will do the job for you, can prove more efficient in terms of both: cost and effort spent. Teams that provide professional web scraping service are usually more skilled and credible. The investment will be beneficial for your business in the long run and well worth it.
In the end, it is obvious that real estate data extraction is capable of making things way easier for your business and giving your company a tremendous advantage. It is one of the best ways to ensure that the information your company has is comprehensive, deep and up-to-date. While looking to purchase or rent a property, your customers are exposed to large amounts of information including location, price, agents, and images of the property. Being in possession of that information can help focus your company’s efforts on another, more important aspects of your business, like convincing the prospective buyers to choose the property that you are offering.
What other ways do you think web scraping is helping the real estate industry? Tell us all about those in the comment section below!
