Proxies for Real Estate Sites

Who needs this and why

Agencies keep an eye on how their own properties and their competitors' are listed. Investors compare prices and rents across cities before they buy. Analysts collect public listing data to calculate average prices, time on market and shifts in demand.

All of these tasks need a view from inside the market. The major platforms serve their own country: Zillow and Realtor.com the US, Rightmove and Zoopla the UK, Immowelt and ImmoScout24 Germany, Otodom Poland, DOM.RIA Ukraine. Some of them restrict or change what they show to visitors from other countries.

Rules and data come first

Collect only public listing data: price, floor area, neighborhood, number of rooms, date listed. Names, phone numbers and email addresses of private sellers are personal data. Collecting and storing them is regulated by law, for example by GDPR in the EU and the UK, and that question is one to settle with a lawyer, not with a proxy.

Many platforms offer official feeds, APIs or partner programs for agencies and analytics companies. If that option exists, start with it: the data arrives ready to use, and the terms of use are clear up front. A proxy is for cases where there is no official channel or where you need to check what a visitor actually sees.

Read the site's rules and keep a sensible pace: do not put more load on the platform than a careful analyst with a script would. A proxy does not override the platform's rules.

Listings and prices by city and ZIP

On real estate sites, search results depend heavily on location. An apartment in Boston and one in Austin, a house near Manchester and one in London, a rental in Munich and one in Leipzig - these are different markets. Many platforms also fill in the region from the visitor's IP if the search does not specify one.

For a country-wide picture, choose the country in the generator. If you need a specific market, turn on advanced mode: there you can specify a region (a state for the US), any city by name, or a ZIP. Keep in mind: traffic with precise geo (region, city, ZIP or carrier (ASN)) is counted double. Turn it on where the address actually changes the results.

Check in a clean browser profile without signing in. Platforms remember your last searched city and saved filters, and those will override the location of your IP.

Regular listing monitoring

A typical task is to go through new listings in several cities once a day and flag price changes. The "Rotating (new IP per request)" mode works well for this: port 823 (HTTP) or 824 (SOCKS5) gives a new address for every request, and the load is spread across different IPs.

1. Build a list of search pages for the cities and filters you need.
2. Crawl them with pauses and save only the fields you need.
3. Open a property page only if the listing is new or its price has changed.
4. Keep the history on your side so you do not request the same pages again.

A plan allows up to 1000 concurrent connections, but for real estate sites start with a few threads and scale up gradually. The general principles of this kind of collection are in the web scraping and price monitoring use cases.

Your own listings through a buyer's eyes

It helps an agency to see its listings the way a client in another country sees them. Say you are selling apartments in Warsaw, and a buyer is searching from Germany or Canada. Open the platform through a proxy in that country and check:

• where the property ranks in search results for its neighborhood;
• which currency the price is shown in and how;
• whether the photos, floor plan and description display correctly;
• which similar properties the platform shows next to it.

For this kind of check, the "Sticky session" mode on a port in the 10000-20000 range is convenient: the whole check runs from one address. The port holds an IP for 1 to 120 minutes, 30 by default. A sticky residential IP can change early if the device goes offline - the port then gets a new address in the same country.

Which proxies to choose

For real estate sites, people usually go with residential proxies at $1.59 per GB. These are addresses from home internet providers, so the platform looks exactly as it does to a regular visitor. Large sites often answer datacenter addresses with a check or a CAPTCHA.

Datacenter proxies at $0.80 per GB are worth a try for smaller platforms and technical checks. Mobile proxies at $2.50 per GB come in handy when you need to view the mobile version of a site from a carrier address.

What to know in advance

• We do not promise that a site will accept a particular address: the platform decides who gets access.
• If a site responds with a CAPTCHA, lower your request rate rather than looking for a way around it.
• Banks and payment systems are blocked through our proxies. The list is on the blocked sites page.

How much traffic you need

Real estate pages are heavy: photo galleries, maps, sometimes video and 3D tours. Price collection does not need images or maps: turn off their loading, and usage will drop noticeably. Traffic is counted in both directions. The traffic calculator helps you estimate the volume; the gigabytes you buy never expire, and prices are on the pricing page.