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Case Study: Realitio
Things move fast in the online real estate world and Apify is helping Realitio keep ahead of the crowd. Using Apify, Realitio aggregates listings from the 23 largest Czech websites offering properties for sale and rent. Apify applies web scraping techniques to these websites every few minutes and downloads millions of pages every month so that Realitio can display live listings in a user-friendly way.
Realitio users can quickly search listings from multiple websites to find a property that meets their criteria. If they don’t find something immediately, the user can set up notifications to tell them as soon as a suitable property is listed. This kind of rapid response often enables a Realitio user to be the first person to contact a seller and Realitio has received thanks from many successful purchasers who are happy to have found their home through the site.
Maximillian Copelli
Two crawlers are scheduled for each property listing website. One runs every 10 minutes and scrapes just new properties, the other runs every two days to scrape all listings and keep the entire database up to date. Depending on how many properties are listed, this full crawl can take several hours to complete.
All the data extraction and validation run on the Apify platform and it took just a couple of weeks for Apify to create the crawlers used. The crawlers are maintained by Apify as a service for Realitio and the entire system can easily scale with new property websites or extra countries.
Realitio can also do some interesting things with the data they collect using Apify. For instance, they create pricing maps to show users whether the price of a property is within the appropriate range for an area. In future, Realitio plans to add price estimates for vendors and landlords who want to know how much they should charge for their property.
Realitio has a significant technological advantage compared to other aggregators: thanks to Apify, we list properties on our portal 10–20 minutes after they appear on the source website. We have also been able to significantly speed up the detection of inactive listings. Realitio provides structured and geolocation-based search even if the crawled websites do not support such advanced search features.
— Bohdan Koleček, Realitio co-founder
Realitio is just one example of how the Apify platform can scrape data from any listings websites and allow that information to be used in new and unexpected ways. Sign up now or contact us if you would like to explore how Apify can help you.
