SpareRoom UK Flatshare & Room Rental Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

SpareRoom is the UK's biggest flatshare and room-rental board — a genuinely different product from every for-sale UK property Actor in this fleet: these are rooms and shares, priced per month or per week, not homes for sale. This Actor pulls every listing card off a SpareRoom /flatshare/<location> search page — London, Manchester, Brighton, or any other UK town or city — and normalizes it into clean fields: a bare GBP rent figure, neighbourhood, postcode, property type, and who's advertising (agent, live-in landlord, or a current flatmate), instead of the single scannable card the site renders for humans.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes, rotated across requests, so the target sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Proxy session rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block, on a fixed datacenter pack rather than a geo-random pool, and every page is checked for real GBP rents and UK postcodes before a row is emitted, so you never get a wrong page silently.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Location- and listing-level fault isolation — one blocked location or one bad card is skipped and logged, never crashes the run.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, numeric rent fields with an explicit period instead of one scannable card.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Room-hunting automation — pull current listings for a city, filtered by rent range, to build your own shortlist or alert feed.
• Rental market benchmarking — track room-rental prices and availability across London, Manchester, Brighton, and other UK locations.
• PropTech and rental-market analytics — feed a clean, deduped flatshare dataset into a pricing model.
• Relocation and student-housing services — build client-facing room shortlists with neighbourhood and postcode data included.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Enter one or more SpareRoom location slugs — the /flatshare/<location> path segment (london, manchester, brighton-and-hove), or paste a full search URL.
3. Optionally set a rent range and how many pages to walk per location.
4. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
5. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
locations	array	yes	—	SpareRoom location slugs, e.g. london. A full search URL also works. Up to 25.
maxPagesPerLocation	integer	no	3	Result pages per location. Pagination is offset-based (offset += 10), not page numbers.
maxResults	integer	no	100	Cap on rows this run, summed across all locations.
minRent	integer	no	—	Minimum rent filter, in rentPeriod units (GBP).
maxRent	integer	no	—	Maximum rent filter, in rentPeriod units (GBP).
rentPeriod	string	no	pcm	pcm (per month) or pw (per week) — the unit minRent/maxRent are expressed in.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	BUYPROXIES94952 DATACENTER	The datacenter group is named explicitly; the exit country is not pinned (the pack is US-only). Page identity is verified from the listing data, not the exit IP.

Example input

{
  "locations": ["london", "manchester", "brighton-and-hove"],
  "maxPagesPerLocation": 2,
  "maxResults": 30,
  "rentPeriod": "pcm",
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": []
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
listing_id	string	SpareRoom's numeric listing id — stable, globally unique.
url	string	Canonical https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/... detail URL.
title	string	Listing headline as written by the advertiser.
location	string	The searched location slug, e.g. 'london'.
neighbourhood	['string', 'null']	Area/neighbourhood name, e.g. 'Canada Water'.
postcode	['string', 'null']	UK postcode district, e.g. 'SE16'.
property_type	['string', 'null']	'flat', 'house', 'studio', etc.
property_type_detail	['string', 'null']	More specific type when stated, e.g. 'studio flat'.
rooms_in_property	['integer', 'null']	Total rooms in the shared property.
advertiser_role	['string', 'null']	'agent', 'live in landlord', 'live out landlord', 'current flatmate', 'former flatmate'.
rent_amount	['number', 'null']	Headline rent, parsed to a bare number.
rent_period_unit	['string', 'null']	'pcm' or 'pw'.
rent_normalised_amount	['number', 'null']	Per-room-equivalent rent for multi-room listings.
rent_normalised_period_unit	['string', 'null']	Period rent_normalised_amount is quoted in.
status	['string', 'null']	'new', 'new today', 'boosted'.
days_old	['integer', 'null']	Days since the listing was posted.
available_now	boolean	True when the room is available immediately.
ad_verified	boolean	True when SpareRoom has ID-verified the advertiser.
has_video	boolean	True when the listing includes a video.
photo_count	['integer', 'null']	Number of photos on the listing.
photo_url	['string', 'null']	Listing's primary photo URL, when present.
currency	string	Always 'GBP'.
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 UTC row-creation timestamp.

Example output

{
  "listing_id": "18363867",
  "url": "https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/london/canada_water/18363867",
  "title": "New Studio Style Rooms, En-Suites & Kitchenettes",
  "location": "london",
  "neighbourhood": "Canada Water",
  "postcode": "SE16",
  "property_type": "house",
  "property_type_detail": null,
  "rooms_in_property": 6,
  "advertiser_role": "live out landlord",
  "rent_amount": 1500.0,
  "rent_period_unit": "pcm",
  "rent_normalised_amount": 1500.0,
  "rent_normalised_period_unit": "pcm",
  "status": "new",
  "days_old": 0,
  "available_now": true,
  "ad_verified": false,
  "has_video": true,
  "photo_count": 9,
  "photo_url": "https://photos2.spareroom.co.uk/images/flatshare/listings/square/63/30/63302902.jpg",
  "currency": "GBP",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-16T12:00:00+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-row	$0.0012	Per unique dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $1.40. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

v1 is search-results only — no detail-page enrichment (full description, house rules, exact address, all photos). Pagination is offset-based and each page carries roughly 11 listings; a location with heavy inventory needs a higher maxPagesPerLocation to see deeper into it. rent_normalised_amount is SpareRoom's own per-room split for multi-bedroom listings and can differ from rent_amount — read both before assuming one is "the" price. Fields the card doesn't carry (e.g. postcode on some commercial/edge listings) come back null rather than guessed.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a SpareRoom account or API key?

No. This Actor scrapes SpareRoom.co.uk's own publicly listed room data — no login, no API key.

Why a location slug instead of a city name I type freely?

SpareRoom's own URL structure uses a fixed slug per location (london, brighton-and-hove). Search on spareroom.co.uk and copy the slug from the URL, or paste the full search URL — we extract the slug either way.

Is this for-sale property data?

No — SpareRoom is rooms and flatshares to rent, priced per month or per week. If you need for-sale UK property data, see our other UK real-estate Actors.

Can I scrape multiple locations in one run?

Yes — pass multiple location slugs and we fetch and dedupe across all of them.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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