The Best Zillow Scrapers to Use in 2024

What Is Zillow and Why It’s Difficult to Scrape

As you probably know, Zillow is one of the most popular online real estate platforms in the US,  reaching 1.958 billion USD in revenue in 2022. At Zillow, you can easily find properties all over the US that are available for rent, sale, and more, including highly accurate historical sales data, mortgage calculators, and other useful features and tools for the real estate industry.

Since Zillow is a valuable information resource for real estate companies, it deals with a lot of users visiting its website and of course, a high number of users that are trying to scrape the publicly available data on the website. Here are the main reasons why it might be difficult to scrape Zillow with an in-house web scraper:

• Requests limitation – Websites like Zillow limit the number of requests that a user can send from the same IP for a given period of time. If you don’t have a rotating proxies service behind your back, you’ll probably get blocked.
• CAPTCHAs – CAPTCHAs are probably the biggest nightmare of every web scraping operation. Websites like Zillow use CAPTCHAs to make sure that the requests are made by a human, and therefore a CAPTCHA solving tool is required or a rotation of the browser fingerprints.
• Dynamic content – Some of the content on Zillow is dynamic, meaning that the content on a certain page can change based on different types of data, often based on the user behavior on the website. Dynamic content is considered difficult to scrape because there is still a JS code running in the background (rendering), which loads content. To be able to scrape dynamic content on Zillow, you’ll need some serious programming skills.

Even if you manage to bypass all those crazy challenges, it will be very difficult to scale your scraper to its max potential without using a dedicated Zillow scraper, which can take care of all the difficulties mentioned above and help you rocket launch your project 🚀.

It is important to say that Zillow isn’t fighting web scraping and even has its own API which is really good, but also very limited in the number of API calls you can make.

The Best Zillow Scrapers in 2024

All the tools that you’ll see here have been thoughtfully reviewed by us and the rankings in this list are based on the same criteria we used to review the best web scraping tools. The criteria we used:

• Is it fully managed?
• Programming languages support
• Ease of use
• Price
• Built-in proxies
• API integration
• Customer support quality

1. Apify

Our choice for Zillow scraping

Total rating: 9.5/10

When it comes to Zillow scraping, Apify came on top. The main Apify Zillow actor has more than 790 users at this point and has been run 5.9K times. With this specific actor, you can easily extract all the data you need about properties from Zillow using the Zillow API while skipping the API calls limit.

Apify allows you to download the scraping results in the following formats: JSON, XLSX, CSV, HTML, and even as an RSS feed. If you’ll want to run their in-house proxies with the scraper, just use the following object value:

{ "useApifyProxy": true }

Apify’s main Zillow scraper comes with some really cool inputs which are easy to use and don’t require a lot of programming knowledge. Regarding the documentation, we don’t have any complaints as it is perfect and includes a changelog created by the owner of the scraper.

The results are perfect, with a success rate of 97% (when using residential proxies)  and you can take a look at the output here. You can even try the scraper for totally free, without even adding a credit card. If you’ll wish to continue using the Zillow scraper provided by Apify, you’ll have to pay about $0.25 for each 2K results.

Features – Apify

• Free trial available
• Perfect documentation
• Fair pricing
• You can see the popularity of the actor
• Other Zillow scrapers are available
• Actors are customizable

Disadvantages – Apify

• Can be difficult for newbies
• Proxies quality isn’t the highest