Ohio eLicense Scraper

Look up Ohio real estate, appraiser, home inspector, appraisal management company, and related professional licenses issued by the Ohio Department of Commerce, Division of Real Estate & Professional Licensing (REPL). Search by license number, licensee/business name, or browse an entire license type — straight from Ohio's own public eLicense Online license lookup tool. No login, no API key, no proxy required.

What this actor does

• Five search modes:
  • byLicenseType — browse every license currently on file for a credential type (Real Estate Salesperson, Broker, Appraiser, Home Inspector, Appraisal Management Company, and more)
  • byLicenseNumber — exact license-number lookup
  • byName — search by licensee first/last (and optional maiden) name
  • byBusinessName — search by brokerage/company/DBA name
  • byCity — browse every license on file in a given city
• 37 Ohio REPL license/credential types covering real estate brokers, broker associates, salespersons, real estate corporations/LLCs, certified general and residential appraisers (plus their out-of-state, reciprocal, and temporary variants), licensed real estate appraisers, appraisal management companies, home inspectors, and foreign real estate dealers
• Narrow any search further with optional city, county, state/province, zip code, and exact-match status filters
• Empty fields are omitted — a field only appears on a record when Ohio actually published that data for the licensee

Output per license

• licenseNumber — Ohio REPL license/credential number
• licenseType — plain-English credential name (e.g. "Real Estate Salesperson")
• licenseeName, firstName, lastName — for individual licensees
• businessName — for brokerages, corporations, and appraisal management companies
• status — license status as published (e.g. "Active", "Expired")
• board — issuing division ("Ohio Division of Real Estate & Professional Licensing (Ohio Department of Commerce)")
• address, city, state, zipCode, county — mailing address, where published
• issueDate, effectiveDate, expirationDate — ISO dates, where published
• supervisingBroker — for salespersons, where published
• sourceUrl — the Ohio eLicense Online license lookup tool
• recordType: "license", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	byLicenseType	byLicenseType / byLicenseNumber / byName / byBusinessName / byCity
licenseTypePrefix	string	–	License/credential type code (required for byLicenseType and byLicenseNumber; optional narrowing filter otherwise)
licenseNumber	string	–	License number without the type prefix (mode=byLicenseNumber)
licenseSuffix	string	–	Optional sub-category/branch-office suffix (mode=byLicenseNumber)
firstName / lastName	string	–	Licensee name (mode=byName; at least one required)
maidenName	string	–	Optional maiden-name search field
businessName	string	–	Brokerage/company/DBA name (mode=byBusinessName)
address	string	–	Optional street-address filter
city	string	–	City (required for byCity; optional narrowing filter otherwise)
county	string	–	Optional Ohio county exact-match narrowing filter (e.g. Franklin)
zipCode	string	–	Optional 5-digit zip-code narrowing filter
state	string	–	Two-letter US state or Canadian province code
status	string	–	Optional exact-match license status filter
maxItems	integer	20	Maximum number of records to return (1-200)
useApifyProxy	boolean	false	Route the search through Apify's free datacenter proxy group

Example: browse a license type

{
  "mode": "byLicenseType",
  "licenseTypePrefix": "SAL",
  "status": "Active",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: look up an exact license number

{
  "mode": "byLicenseNumber",
  "licenseTypePrefix": "SAL",
  "licenseNumber": "2024001234"
}

Example: search by licensee name

{
  "mode": "byName",
  "lastName": "Smith",
  "state": "OH",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: browse all real estate licenses in a city

{
  "mode": "byCity",
  "city": "Columbus",
  "licenseTypePrefix": "SAL",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Use cases

• Real estate due diligence — verify an agent's or broker's license status before signing a deal
• Compliance monitoring — track license status changes for agents, appraisers, or inspectors you work with
• Lead generation — build lists of licensed real estate professionals by city or credential type
• Background research — confirm licensure history for a specific real estate professional or business
• Market research — measure the number of active real estate licensees by license type or city

Data Source

This actor targets elicense3.com.ohio.gov — the Ohio Department of Commerce's "eLicense Online" public license lookup for its Division of Real Estate & Professional Licensing. This is a distinct, older Ohio state licensing portal from the newer, consolidated elicense.ohio.gov site (the eLicense Ohio consortium covering ~24 separate boards including medical, nursing, cosmetology, and engineering).

elicense.ohio.gov was evaluated first and found to be comprehensively blocked at the network/WAF level: every page tested (the site root and the /oh_verifylicense search page) returned a persistent F5 WAF 403 Forbidden ("The requested URL was rejected") both from a plain curl request with a realistic Chrome User-Agent header and from a full real headless Chromium browser session (Playwright) — i.e. this is not merely a TLS-fingerprint or missing-header block, both request types were rejected identically. Ohio's data.ohio.gov open-data portal also republishes a "State of Ohio Licensure

• Individual" bulk dataset covering the same 24 boards (2.3M+ rows), but its only discovered public export path (download-file) consistently returns 412 Validation failed for the documented request shape; the endpoint appears to require additional client-side request signing beyond what a plain HTTP client can replicate without live-browser reverse engineering.

elicense3.com.ohio.gov — a genuinely distinct, still-active, and fully public Ohio government licensing system operated by the same Department of Commerce — returns real HTML with no login wall, no CAPTCHA, and no bot challenge for every page tested. It covers real estate brokers and salespersons, real estate corporations/LLCs, certified general/residential appraisers, licensed real estate appraisers, appraisal management companies, home inspectors, and foreign real estate dealers.

Limitations

• Ohio's own lookup page currently displays a notice that this system "has been retired and the data is no longer updated, effective 10/16/25" — the search tool itself is still live and fully queryable, but the underlying license records are a frozen snapshot as of that date rather than continuously updated. Ohio directs visitors to com.ohio.gov/real for current information; that destination does not expose an equivalent public search API at this time.
• This actor covers licenses issued by Ohio's Division of Real Estate & Professional Licensing only — it does not cover the ~24 other boards reachable through the newer elicense.ohio.gov consortium portal (medical, nursing, cosmetology, pharmacy, engineering, accountancy, etc.), which is blocked as documented above.
• A small number of credential-type codes (e.g. ARA, BBB, BRKP, CBR, CEO, CRC, FPR, LPR, RECE, SALM, SOLE) do not have a confidently documented plain-English meaning publicly available; these are exposed with their raw Ohio REPL code as the label rather than a guessed name (CGR is confirmed live to cover cemetery registrations, e.g. results named "<Name> Cemetery").
• Browsing broadly by licenseTypePrefix alone (mode=byLicenseType, no name/city/status filter) returns Ohio's own default sort order, which is observed to surface long-inactive licenses (revoked/void/deceased/resigned) before currently active ones for large credential types. Add a status filter (the actor pages deeper automatically when status is set) or narrow with city/name to reliably surface active licensees.
• Fields such as supervisingBroker, county, and effectiveDate only appear on records where Ohio's own license-detail grid publishes them.

FAQ

Do I need a login or API key? No. This actor uses Ohio's public eLicense Online license lookup tool, which requires no account.

Can I look up a specific license number? Yes — set mode to byLicenseNumber, choose the matching licenseTypePrefix, and enter the licenseNumber.

How current is the data? Records are scraped live from Ohio's own license lookup tool at run time.

Why don't some records have an expiration date or address? Ohio only publishes the fields it has on file for a given licensee. This actor never fabricates or fills in placeholder values for missing data.