RentCafe Scraper

Scrape apartment listings from RentCafe.com for any US city — bedroom/price tiers, ratings, amenities, management company, coordinates and photos. No login, no API key, no proxy required.

What this actor does

• 36 listing filters — bedroom count (studio/1-4 BR), price tiers (under $500-$2,000), and amenity feeds (pet friendly, pool, fitness center, garage, hardwood floors, furnished, luxury, and more)
• Client-side refinement — minimum rating, min/max price, pet-friendly-only, stacked on top of the site filter
• Full listing detail — name, address, coordinates, star rating + review count, bedroom/price pairs, amenity summary, management company, verified-listing flag, promo badges, photo
• Automatic pagination up to your maxItems cap
• Empty fields are omitted — every record only contains data actually present on the listing

Output per listing

• propertyId, name, url
• street, city, state, zip, fullAddress
• latitude, longitude
• rating, reviewCount
• bedPricePairs[] — {beds, startingPrice} per unit type advertised
• minPrice, maxPrice, minBeds, maxBeds
• amenitySummary[], badges[] (e.g. "Rent specials", "New Units Available")
• verifiedListing
• photoUrl
• managementCompany
• locationSlug, filterApplied, scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
location	string	austin-tx	City, e.g. austin-tx, Austin, TX, new-york-city-ny
filter	select	None	One RentCafe site filter (bedroom count / price tier / amenity) — 36 options
minRating	integer	–	Drop listings rated below this (0-5)
minPrice / maxPrice	integer	–	Monthly starting-price range
petFriendlyOnly	boolean	false	Only listings whose amenity summary mentions "Pet friendly"
maxItems	integer	25	Hard cap on emitted records (1-2000). RentCafe itself typically surfaces at most ~500 listings per single location/filter combination, even for the largest cities.

Example: 2-bedroom listings in Austin rated 4+ under $2,000/mo

{
  "location": "austin-tx",
  "filter": "2-bedroom",
  "minRating": 4,
  "maxPrice": 2000,
  "maxItems": 50
}

How to find a location slug

Browse RentCafe.com for your target city — the URL path segment right after /apartments-for-rent/ is the slug to use here (e.g. rentcafe.com/apartments-for-rent/austin-tx/ → austin-tx). Multi-word cities usually append the state abbreviation directly, e.g. new-york-city-ny, los-angeles-ca. You can also just type City, ST and the actor will normalize it for you (results depend on RentCafe recognizing the generated slug).

Data source & reliability

RentCafe server-renders listing cards directly into the page HTML (schema.org ApartmentComplex microdata); this actor parses that HTML using a Chrome-TLS-fingerprint HTTP client to pass RentCafe's bot-protection layer. No residential proxy, cookies or login are used or required.

Note on the url field: RentCafe's bot-protection blocks requests whose TLS fingerprint doesn't match a real browser — a plain curl or non-browser HTTP client will get a 403 even though the URL itself is valid and opens normally in any real web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.).

FAQs

Does this require a proxy or login? No — it runs entirely on Apify's free datacenter access, no credentials needed.

Can I combine two site filters, e.g. 2-bedroom + pet-friendly? RentCafe's search only supports one filter segment per page. Use the filter input for the axis that matters most, then use minPrice/maxPrice/minRating/petFriendlyOnly for additional client-side narrowing.

Why do some listings have fewer fields than others? RentCafe only shows what the property manager provided (e.g. not every listing has a star rating yet). Fields with no real data are omitted rather than emitted as null/empty.