Finding a place to live can be tough. If for any reason you are unable to buy a house, the search for a rental apartment can cost you a lot of time and money. Real estate agencies will often charge you before you've even visited your first potential "object". The subscriptions they force upon you are unfair and do not guarantee success of finding a place to live.

This project aims to relieve some pain by giving you insights of the offers at several agencies. By collecting and comparing this data, you can pick an agency that is best suited for your needs. Saving you time and potentially money.

You can run the estate crawler by executing the crawler.py file. Below is an example that uses make as a taskrunner to install dependencies and run the crawler.

make install
./crawler.py --region amsterdam,rotterdam,arnhem

By default this will output all results to a results.json file in the build folder. You are able to configure this path by adding an --output-file argument. Other arguments are listed when issuing --help.

If you have the luxury of Docker available on your system, you can run the crawler without installing any dependencies like so:

docker run --rm -it --name my-crawler-instance -v $(pwd):/app/build docker.io/nstapelbroek/estate-crawler --region amsterdam

Because we're mounting your current directory in /app/build, there should be a results.json file available after a successful run.