Show HN: Property Trends Scraped from Zillow

It uses the Zillow data set mentioned above. I would suggest giving it a shot as well, the graphs are rudimentary but they work well enough for me. :)

Well, selling it to Zillow is probably a natural fit. Or some other realtor org, but you'd probably have to change the source of your data.

One way you could monetize would be to make deals with MLSes for integration into their services, either for realtors or for consumers. Can't tell how appropriate it would be for realtors, I assume it's more oriented towards consumers.

If there's some way to get to see Northern Colorado there, I can send it around to some POI in the local MLS and see what they think. Again, you might not be looking for MLS feedback.

Disclaimer: I run coloproperty.com and the MLS. :-)

I think folks who are house hunting will find this useful when looking for comps (they will be getting information for multiple if not all houses in their target zip code in a table; they can easily digest the information in the table). So you could potentially charge a small fee (say $5 - $20) for house hunters to run this query and have the information available to them (say a link) for a month or so. During that period, they can click on the custom generated link and it will give them the most recent result.

Same thing for 'Average days in the market' but this will be targeted at those looking to sell.

The trick would be where to find these folks so they know about your service. Maybe advertise in housing forums or reddit (find the housing related forums)

edit: One other thing, it showed "Loading property 6 of undefined..." then back to "We did not get any results" which seems quirky.

I found this interesting, and was immediately curious for more: what the data was like going back more than a month, if there are any correlations to number of bedrooms, school districts, or the like, etc. etc. I could imagine you coming up with very interesting auto-generated 40-50 page reports.

I would not pay for this now, but when I was on the real estate market last year I might have. You could target individual buyers or sellers ($5-20 or so for a single report), real estate agents (some sort of subscription), or both -- don't know what the best strategy is.

They spend a ton of money on market analysis products because most of them don't have any sort of background that helps with it.

If it helps them get 1 more client or help a listing sell for just a couple % more it has paid for itself.

Button it up a bit, paywall it, run every zipcode as a job and cache the fully rendered html report the end user sees.

I'd say go ahead and display ads, just do it without being obnoxious. Limit ads to small static images hosted on your own domain or text links, keep them unobtrusive, and don't use Google or any other evil surveillance capitalism company.

Because the site is driven by zip code you've got a great opportunity to provide ads relevant to the area and not the specific user. Anyone who finds reasonable ads so off-putting that it would drive them away from your service will be using ad blockers anyway.

Personally, I never register for websites if they require an email address unless they have a need to know my identity to accomplish what I want from them. Your site wouldn't meet that requirement so no registration for you. I'll sign up for some sites that need a registration but don't require a legit email address but they don't get my real info (fake names, addresses, etc)

Remember that any information you collect you then have to retain, backup, secure, etc. and it puts on the hook for reporting data breaches and for gathering and handing all of that information over to governments and other parties in response to court orders. Never collect or store any more data than you absolutely need to and you'll have so much less to worry about.

If you really really want to make money without ads, limit the number of accesses to something sane and charge the people who hammer your site day after day or week after week some fee for the trouble. They obviously find your service useful so maybe a small fee would be worth it to most of them. Maybe you can even offer to automatically push the kinds of data they keep requesting over and over again to them in some way.

I'm pretty sure the splash image is London, UK. Very confusing!

Data use agreements with those organizations require that anyone using it make efforts to prevent its being scraped.

Source: have signed a DUA with an MLS myself for academic research.

That being said, you still need to be resource-polite. A lot of people scrape Zillow through browser automation toolkits like Selenium, Puppeteer etc. because it's a JS heavy website and these tools are really bandwidth intensive. This could, in theory, get you in trouble for DDOS.

Instead, since Zillow is using Next.js for their backend so, you can actually retrieve the dataset for any page just by parsing the nextjs cache. This can be done by selecting data in the <script id="__NEXT_DATA__"> node which requires minimal resources from both sides. e.g. in python:

  import json
  import httpx
  from parsel import Selector
  
  response = httpx.get("https://www.zillow.com/b/1625-e-13th-st-brooklyn-ny-5YGKWY/")
  script_data = Selector(text=response.text).css('#__NEXT_DATA__').get()
  script_data = json.loads(script_data)
  # all of the property data is here, for example building details:
  print(script_data['building'])