Web Scraping Software Development

Our client is a mid-sized real estate company and has a presence in multiple cities across India. The real estate market is really competitive these days, as so many strong competitors have already entered the field. Hence, he decided to have a Web Scraping Tool for his business that tracks property prices, competitor listings, and market demand trends across various online property portals.Previously, they were using the manual method, such as researching the data across various websites, doing market surveys, etc. But this technique was not 100% reliable as the data is collected by humans, and it can contain errors. Also, this was a time-consuming process. So they approached us to build a custom web scraping software for automating the data extraction process, and get real-time insights.

A Challenge to Create a Web Scraping Software:

The real estate industry is already challenging due to growing competition among realtors. Our client was facing many operational and technical challenges that required the best web scraping software. Manually monitoring multiple property portals for listings, prices, and sometimes giving inconsistent and old data, which impacted the business.

As multiple members of the team were doing research, this caused variations in the data and a lack of uniform decisions. The client is a growing business and expanding to many regions, hence the wrong data and wrong decisions were impacting investment.

Fetching quality data from different websites was a challenging task because every website uses a different HTML structure and JavaScript. Some were also using anti-scraping mechanisms like CAPTCHAs. To get real-time data, we used a scalable scraping infrastructure to easily run it without triggering IP bans. The data accuracy and cleansing required a highly experienced data scientist to develop an intelligent logic.

Also, our client mentioned that most of the real estate people are from a non-tech background, so the portal has to be no-code and easy to use for them.

Best Web Scraping Tool Implemented By Our Team

To solve the client’s challenges, we decided to use a modular scraping engine to adapt the platform according to the portal’s structure. The client mentioned the customization during the requirement discussion, hence we added a modular scraping engine to allow users to change the portal layout and customize the behaviour.

Our dedicated team added built-in error logging and retry mechanisms for uninterrupted data flow. Plus, we created a centralized data warehouse using PostgreSQL with a normalized schema to organize property data like location, price, area, configuration, and amenities across platforms. Our developers created a custom job scheduler to run scrapers at a specific time interval.

For the front-end, we used ReactJS to have a clean and user-friendly dashboard. We also included graphical analytics, demand heatmaps, and user-role-based access control to make this software secure.

To solve the above challenges of our client's business, we implemented the following features in the web scraper software.

Key Features of Web Scraping Software:

1. Multi-site Scraping: It will extract useful data from the top real estate websites like 99 acres, MagicBrick, housing.com, and more.
2. Dynamic Content Handling: It allows scraping JavaScript-heavy websites using headless browsers like Puppeteer or Playwright.
3. Proxy & IP Rotation: This helps to bypass anti-scraping mechanisms and avoid blocking.
4. Real-time Job Scheduling: We added a custom scheduler that will schedule scraping tasks within a specific time interval.
5. Centralized Data Warehouse: All the property-related data from different areas will be stored and managed at one centralized location. 
6. Data Cleaning and Validation: Our developers developed a logic to handle duplicate data, missing fields, and other inconsistencies. 
7. User-friendly Dashboard: Users can search for properties in a particular city/area selection, according to type and budget.
8. Reports and Analytics: We integrated AI to fetch useful reports and analytics related to price, trends, demand spikes, and much more.
9. Export File: Users can export the file into the desired formats to access the data when offline.
10. Notification Alerts: Users will receive notifications and important alerts regarding market changes, jobs, and more.
11. User Authentication and Role-based Access: Secure login with role-based access controls for different team members.

Result of Data Extraction Platform:

We have provided the best custom software development services to diverse industries for 14+ years, and the results delivered are commendable.

• Client reduced research time by 90%, hence they can now focus on better sales and strategy.
• Real-time insights helped them adjust pricing dynamically based on local competition and demand.
• Client can now easily find high-demand locations and underpriced listings faster, enabling smarter investment decisions.
• Reduced errors and inconsistencies in market reports, boosting internal decision-making accuracy.
• The client expanded the software’s use across its new cities and added their rental and commercial property teams to the platform within 3 months.

Technologies and Tools:

• Front-end: ReactJS, Chart.js, Tailwind CSS
• Back-end: Node.js
• Web Scraping Tools: Puppeteer, Cheerio
• Database: PostgreSQL
• DevOps: Docker, GitHub Actions