As the internet continues to grow, the amount of data it generates grows with it, opening new opportunities to improve processes and make more informed decisions. Real estate is one of the many industries that are being disrupted by data-related technologies and innovations. Whether you are a broker, realtor, investor, or property manager you have the potential to become data-driven and gain invaluable insights from web extracted data.
You will see the many ways real estate data can guide you and how utilizing web scraping can help you and your organization become disruption-proofed and fully prepared for the world of tomorrow.
Why web data extraction is a big cheese
There is more data available in the real estate market than ever. There are numerous listing sites, endless data points available for everyone to see. And if there’s data, there might be a way to learn something new from the data to make better decisions. But there’s one big issue…
It’s hard to get the data in an analytical way. But you need to get the data first, to gain insights.
Unfortunately, many websites don’t provide APIs. Or even if they do, you might not get all the data you want only in a limited form. But still, the publicly available data is there, you just don’t have a direct way to get the data. This is where web data extraction comes in. Web data extraction allows you to get this publicly available real estate data at scale. Using the correct tools or partnering with a data scrapping partner, like crawbee, allows you to tap into the world of web scraping and enjoy the benefits of high-quality data
5 ways real estate data can guide you
1. Evaluate property value
There are many situations where estimating the value of a property is crucial. Maybe you’re trying to list it online for the most accurate price, maybe you’re trying to get financing or you’re analyzing a property before purchasing. You want to get the most accurate value of how much the property is worth. Being in the real estate market means that you have a lot of competition. In order to be ahead of the competition, you need to find ways to know more than others. You can distinguish yourself by accessing alternative data sources. Web data extraction can help by allowing you to fetch structured real estate data from any publicly available listing website. And as web scraping is a new technology for many, it can give you huge value as you will have considerably more data, and thus, information, in your hands. With web scraping, you can gather all the data points that exist about the given property, if it’s available online. Then, you can use this data to justify your price or position your offer more accurately. Because you see the full picture through web data, you have a better chance to accurately estimate the value of a property.2. Location
Location is one of the key elements that determine the value of a property. Unfortunately, there is no staright way to get access to analytical real estate data from only that specific area you want to analyze.
With web scraping though, you can automate the process of filtering through data so you only extract data that matters to you. Or you can just capture the whole market data from the web then filter the data yourself, depending on your requirements.
3. Raw numbers that effect emotions
When it comes to properties, there are many numerical data points that can influence the price: square footage, age, last sold price, etc. When buying a property for yourself, emotions play a crucial role in your decision making. Sometimes you are willing to pay more because you have strong emotional argument.
But also, it is always crucial to look at the raw numbers of a property before purchasing. You can make smarter decisions if you first look at the raw data and make a data-driven decision. Especially when it’s a property you purchase for investment purposes. Without web scraping, you cannot see the full market’s prices and other data points in a structured way.
4. Vacancy rates
When buying a property for investment purposes, the vacancy rate is a crucial element that can be a dealbreaker or even one of the main reasons you purchase a property. If the vacancy rate goes down in a market, the rents are expected to increase because the demand is higher. On the other hand, if the vacancy rate goes up that means the demand is lower so the rents are expected to decrease.
Unfortunately, many agents use a static vacancy rate when analyzing a property and neglect the actual data. They do this, vulgarly, because they don’t have time to do the research themselves. Fortunately, with the help of web scraping, it doesn’t take that much time to gather high-dimensional data about the real estate market and calculate the expected vacancy rate more accurately. Collecting fresh pricing and rents data, along with recent property completions and calculating lease lengths can help you to determine vacancy rates.