HomeGuide Scraper

Scrape HomeGuide.com — the public US home-services pro directory — for business profiles, ratings, reviews, contact info, services offered, and operating hours. Built for marketers, lead-gen analysts, real-estate teams, and home-services aggregators who need clean, structured data on local contractors and service pros.

Coverage: 50 US states + DC, 80+ home-service categories (cleaning, plumbing, HVAC, electricians, landscaping, contractors, roofing, etc.), thousands of cities. Public data only — no login, no cookies, no auth.

What this actor does

This scraper visits HomeGuide listing pages (national category, or state/city-scoped) and individual provider profile pages, then emits a flat dataset of pros with their structured business data.

It uses HomeGuide's own JSON-LD LocalBusiness and ItemList schema markup as the primary source of truth, plus the embedded app-page-state JSON for richer details (lat/lng, operating hours, listed services).

Input modes

Mode	What you provide	What you get
By URLs	A list of HomeGuide URLs (provider profiles, category pages, or city pages)	Records for each URL — full provider profile if it's a profile URL, paginated listings if it's a directory page
By category	A category slug (e.g. house-cleaning); optionally a state + city	Top providers for that category nationally, or filtered to a city
By location	A US state code (e.g. ca); optionally a city slug and category	All pros listed for that location

Input fields

• mode — byUrls, byCategory, or byLocation
• urls — direct HomeGuide URLs (used when mode=byUrls)
• category — one of 80+ predefined service category slugs
• stateCode — two-letter US state code (50 states + DC)
• city — lowercase, hyphenated city slug (e.g. los-angeles, new-york)
• maxItems — global cap on emitted records (default 25, max 1000)
• maxPagesPerListing — paginated listing pages to crawl per seed URL (HomeGuide returns ~10 pros per page)
• fetchProfileDetails — when on, visits each provider's profile page for richer data (full address, hours, reviews, services)
• maxReviewsPerProfile — cap on reviews kept per provider
• useProxy — route through Apify proxy (HomeGuide is normally reachable from datacenter IPs without a proxy)
• autoEscalateOnBlock — automatically retry with exponential backoff on 503/Cloudflare challenges
• proxyConfiguration — Apify proxy configuration object (only used when useProxy=true); leave at the default to let Apify pick groups

Output fields

Every record includes (when available — empty fields are dropped):

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Business name
category	string	HomeGuide category slug (from URL)
city, state	string	Listing geography (from URL)
streetAddress, postalCode, fullAddress	string	Mailing address
latitude, longitude	number	Geo coordinates
phoneNumber	string	Public business phone
websiteUrl	string	Provider website (when published)
ratingValue, reviewCount	number	Aggregate rating + count
numberOfEmployees	number	Self-reported team size
paymentAccepted	array	Listed payment methods
servicesOffered	array	Listed service offerings
socialLinks	array	Linked social-profile URLs
imageUrl	string	Profile image
hours	array	Per-day open/close blocks; openHHMM/closeHHMM are HHMM ints (e.g. 1700 = 17:00)
reviews	array	Up to maxReviewsPerProfile reviews with rating, text, author, date
breadcrumb	array	HomeGuide breadcrumb names
canonicalUrl, profileUrl, sourceUrl	string	Canonical URLs
providerSlug	string	Last URL-path segment of the profile
siteName	string	Always HomeGuide
recordType	string	Always pro
scrapedAt	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp

FAQs

Does this scraper require login or cookies? No. HomeGuide profiles and category listings are fully public.

Will it work without a proxy? Yes. HomeGuide does not aggressively block datacenter IPs. You can enable Apify proxy via the input switch if you do see 503s.

How many pros per listing page? ~10 LocalBusiness items per page. Use maxPagesPerListing to deepen coverage for a given category/location.

Why are some fields missing on some pros? Different providers fill in different optional fields on their HomeGuide profiles. The scraper drops empty fields rather than emitting null/"".

Does the actor scrape costs/articles pages? No. This actor focuses on the pro directory. Cost-guide URLs under /costs/ will be ignored.

Is this scraper compliant with HomeGuide's robots.txt? HomeGuide's robots.txt disallows internal-only paths (/pros, /admin/, /lead, etc.). The directory and profile URLs this actor crawls are explicitly allowed.

Daily test prefill

The default INPUT.json runs a small byCategory scrape (house-cleaning in NY/Brooklyn, max 5 records, 1 listing page) which reliably returns ≥1 record on Apify's daily test runs.