SpareRoom Scraper - UK Room Rental Listings

Scrape SpareRoom UK room rental listings into clean structured data. The actor extracts listing ID, title, URL, location, postcode, property type, rooms in property, advertiser role, listing type, status, days old, availability, monthly price, room type, photo count, video flag, verification flag, and image URL. Export to JSON/CSV/Excel, run on a schedule, call via API, or connect to Make, Zapier or n8n.

What is the SpareRoom Scraper?

SpareRoom is one of the best-known UK flatshare and room-rental marketplaces. It is used by tenants, landlords, agents, relocation researchers, rental-market analysts, and lead-generation teams. This actor turns public SpareRoom listing pages into a structured dataset that can be filtered, monitored, enriched, and exported.

The actor works with SpareRoom search or listing URLs. Apply filters on SpareRoom first, such as city, rent range, room type, availability, or household preferences, then paste the URL into the actor. It reads the server-rendered listing cards and stable data-listing-* attributes, which makes it lighter and more reliable than a browser-based scraper.

What data does it extract?

• Listing ID and direct listing URL
• Listing title
• Location and postcode
• Property type
• Number of rooms in property
• Advertiser role
• Listing type and brand
• Listing status
• Days old
• Available-now flag
• Price and price period
• Room type
• Photo count
• Video flag
• Verification flag
• Main image URL
• Source URL

Input

Field	Type	Description
urls	array	SpareRoom search/listing URLs to scrape.
maxResults	integer	Maximum listings to return per URL.

Example input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/london"
  ],
  "maxResults": 25
}

Output

{
  "id": "17799978",
  "title": "From 1St of July! Zone 1 ! Flat with 2 Bathrooms!",
  "url": "https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/london/liverpool_street/17799978",
  "location": "Liverpool Street",
  "postcode": "E1",
  "property_type": "flat",
  "rooms_in_property": 4,
  "advertiser_role": "agent",
  "listing_type": "offered",
  "status": "new",
  "days_old": 1,
  "available_now": true,
  "price": 875,
  "price_period": "pcm",
  "room_type": "Double room",
  "photo_count": 10,
  "has_video": false,
  "verified": false,
  "source": "spareroom"
}

Use cases

• Rental-market research: monitor price, room type, and availability by location.
• Lead generation: find agents, landlords, and active rental adverts in target areas.
• Relocation workflows: build room shortlists from filtered SpareRoom searches.
• Market monitoring: schedule runs and compare listing IDs over time.

Practical tips

Use SpareRoom's filters before running the actor. A focused URL gives cleaner data than scraping a broad city page. For example, filter by postcode, budget, available-now, room type, or advertiser type, then paste the resulting URL. Keep id as your deduplication key when comparing scheduled runs.

For lead-gen workflows, combine this actor with website/contact enrichment only when listings include an external website or advertiser information from downstream detail-page enrichment. This version focuses on search results because those fields are stable and fast.

Data quality notes

SpareRoom result pages expose useful structured attributes directly on each listing card. The actor uses those attributes first, then falls back to visible card text when needed. This gives you cleaner IDs, prices, availability flags, advertiser roles, room counts, and listing status than a simple text scraper would produce.

The price field is numeric and the price_period field keeps the original billing interval, such as pcm for per calendar month. That makes it easier to compare rents in spreadsheets, BI dashboards, and scheduled monitoring workflows. available_now, has_video, and verified are boolean fields so you can filter quickly without parsing display labels.

Some public result cards may hide certain details until the listing page is opened. In those cases, the actor still returns the direct url, listing ID, image, location, price, and search-level metadata so you can enrich selected rows later. The goal is a reliable high-volume search scraper first, with detail-page enrichment kept separate so daily checks remain fast.

Monitoring workflow

For daily room-market monitoring, create one Apify schedule per target city or postcode cluster and keep maxResults conservative. Export the dataset to CSV or connect it to Make, Zapier, n8n, Airtable, Google Sheets, BigQuery, or your own API endpoint. Use id as the stable key, then compare price, status, days old, and availability between runs.

Typical monitoring fields:

• New listing IDs that appeared since the last run
• Listings marked as available now
• Price changes for the same listing ID
• New agent or landlord adverts in a postcode
• Rooms with photos or videos
• Listings that move from new to older status

This is especially useful for relocation teams, student housing research, rental-market reports, and property lead workflows where timing matters. Instead of manually checking the same searches every morning, you can let the actor collect a clean snapshot and review only the rows that changed.

Reliability and performance

The actor uses direct HTTP and parses server-rendered listing cards. It does not launch a browser. That keeps the actor inexpensive and suitable for Apify health checks. If one URL fails, the actor logs the issue and continues with the next input URL.

Because it avoids a browser, the actor is also cheaper to run than a Playwright-based workflow. It is designed for public search result pages, small scheduled runs, and simple exports. If SpareRoom changes its card layout, the actor will fail visibly instead of returning silently malformed records.

FAQ

Does it require a SpareRoom account? No. It reads public listing result pages.

Can I scrape filtered searches? Yes. Apply filters on SpareRoom and paste the URL.

Does it open detail pages? This version extracts search-result fields and direct listing URLs. Detail enrichment can be added later.

Does it include phone numbers or emails? Not from the search page. Use detail enrichment or contact workflows where appropriate.

Can I export to Excel? Yes. Apify datasets export to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and RSS.

Can I schedule monitoring? Yes. Use Apify schedules for recurring rental-market checks.

Is it legal? The actor reads public pages. You must respect website terms, rate limits, privacy rules, and applicable laws.

How is billing calculated? Pay-per-event billing charges per listing pushed to the dataset.

What areas are supported? Any public SpareRoom listing/search URL that uses the standard result layout.

Why is the price period separate? Keeping price and price_period separate makes filtering and currency cleanup easier.

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