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Using Apify, Realitio aggregates listings from the 23 largest Czech websites offering properties for sale and rent. Apify uses web scraping to download millions of pages every month so that Realitio can display live listings in a user-friendly way.
Zillow scraping 101
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.
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.
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
