SpareRoom Scraper 🏠

Extract room and flatshare listings from SpareRoom — the UK's largest room rental site — at scale, without an account or API key. Search any town, city or area and get clean JSON, CSV or Excel: rents, room types, availability, bills, furnishings, household details, tenant preferences, advertiser info (landlord / agent / flatmate) and photos.

Whether you track the UK rental market, build a lettings dataset, generate landlord/agent leads, or help tenants find rooms faster, this scraper turns SpareRoom into a spreadsheet in minutes.

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🔑 What this scraper does

• 🔎 Search by location — london, manchester, bristol, edinburgh, any UK place.
• 💷 Rents with period — per calendar month (pcm) or per week (pw), normalised for easy filtering.
• 🛏️ Room & property detail — room type, property type (flat / house), rooms in property, availability date.
• 👤 Advertiser intelligence — landlord (live-in / live-out), letting agent, current/former flatmate — ideal for lead generation.
• 🧾 Full ad details (optional) — description, every room's rent, minimum/maximum term, bills-included, furnishings, deposit, household (ages & genders), tenant preferences (couples / smoking / pets), amenities (wifi, parking, garden) and photos.
• ✅ Verified & freshness flags — verified ads, "new today", days since posted, photo count.
• ⚡ Fast, cheap & reliable — no browser needed, and detail mode is inexpensive.

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📋 Example output

Every listing becomes one record. Detail fields appear when Scrape Detail Pages is enabled:

{
  "id": "18250113",
  "url": "https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/flatshare_detail.pl?flatshare_id=18250113",
  "title": "Double room in a lovely flat in Edmonton",
  "listingType": "offered",
  "rent": 850,
  "rentPeriod": "pcm",
  "location": "Edmonton (N9)",
  "neighbourhood": "Edmonton",
  "postcode": "N9",
  "propertyType": "flat",
  "roomsInProperty": 6,
  "advertiserRole": "live out landlord",
  "status": "new today",
  "daysOld": 0,
  "availableNow": true,
  "verified": true,
  "photos": 7,
  "shortDescription": "Spacious double room in a two-bed flat...",
  "description": "Quiet, professional house on Cornwallis Road, N9...",
  "roomOptions": [
    { "rent": 850, "period": "pcm", "status": "available" },
    { "rent": 1150, "period": "pcm", "status": "available" }
  ],
  "availability": "Available now",
  "minimumTerm": "12 months",
  "maximumTerm": "None",
  "billsIncluded": "Yes",
  "furnishings": "Furnished",
  "totalRooms": "6",
  "householdGender": "2 Females, 1 Male",
  "couplesOk": "No",
  "smokingOk": "No",
  "petsOk": "No",
  "minAge": "30",
  "wifi": "Yes",
  "parking": "Yes",
  "photoUrls": ["https://photos2.spareroom.co.uk/images/flatshare/listings/large/..."],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-06T15:00:00.000Z"
}

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🗂️ Fields you get

Field	Description
id, url	Listing ID and canonical URL
title, shortDescription	Ad title and summary
listingType	offered (room to rent) or wanted (person looking)
rent, rentPeriod	Rent amount and period (pcm / pw), normalised
location, neighbourhood, postcode	Where the room is
propertyType, roomsInProperty	Flat / house and number of rooms
advertiserRole	Landlord (live-in / live-out), agent, current/former flatmate — key for lead gen
status, daysOld, availableNow	Freshness and availability
verified, photos, hasVideo	Verified ad flag, photo count, video flag
description	Full ad description (detail mode)
roomOptions	Each room's rent, period and status (detail mode)
availability, minimumTerm, maximumTerm	When and how long (detail mode)
billsIncluded, furnishings, deposit, totalRooms	Tenancy basics (detail mode)
householdGender, householdOccupation, minAge, maxAge	Who lives there (detail mode)
couplesOk, smokingOk, petsOk, referencesRequired	Tenant preferences (detail mode)
wifi, parking, garden, livingRoom, flatmates	Amenities & household (detail mode)
photoUrls	Photo URLs (detail mode)

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🚀 How to use

1. Click Try for free.
2. Enter one or more Locations (e.g. london, manchester) — or paste full SpareRoom search URLs into Start URLs.
3. (Optional) Choose Listing Type (rooms offered / wanted) and a rent range.
4. (Optional) Turn on Scrape Detail Pages for descriptions, per-room rents, household, bills, preferences and photos.
5. Set Max Items and run. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or pull via API.

Example input

{
  "searchLocations": ["london", "manchester"],
  "listingType": "offered",
  "minRent": 500,
  "maxRent": 1200,
  "scrapeDetails": true,
  "maxItems": 500,
  "maxPagesPerSearch": 20
}

Prefer a pre-filtered search? Copy the URL from your browser into Start URLs:

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/bristol/"],
  "scrapeDetails": true,
  "maxItems": 1000
}

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💡 Popular use cases

🏠 Rental market research

Track room rents by city, area and postcode over time. Benchmark pcm/pw prices, measure supply per location, and spot where rooms are cheapest or most expensive.

🎯 Landlord & agent lead generation

Filter by advertiser role to build lists of letting agents and landlords advertising rooms — with location, property type and posting freshness. Perfect for lettings services, insurers, furniture and utility providers targeting the rental market.

📈 Property investment & HMO analysis

Analyse per-room rents against property size (rooms in property) to estimate gross yields on HMOs and buy-to-let. Find high-yield postcodes and monitor availability.

🧭 Relocation & tenant tools

Power a room-finding app or relocation service: aggregate live rooms across cities with rent, availability and household fit (gender, age, couples/pets/smoking preferences).

📊 PropTech & data products

Feed a rental dataset into dashboards, pricing models or AI assistants. Combine with other sources for a full picture of the UK shared-living market.

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🎛️ Filters explained

• Locations — one or more places as they appear in SpareRoom URLs (london, manchester, leeds…). Each is searched separately.
• Listing Type — Rooms offered (ads with a room to rent) or Rooms wanted (people looking for a room).
• Min / Max Rent (£/month) — keep only listings within your budget (compared on the normalised monthly rent).
• Scrape Detail Pages — opens each ad for the richest record (description, per-room rents, term, bills, furnishings, household, preferences, amenities, photos). Slower but inexpensive.
• Max Items / Max Pages per Search — control run size. Each result page holds about 10 listings.

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❓ FAQ

Do I need a SpareRoom account or API key? No. Just enter a location and run.

Can I get both rooms offered and rooms wanted? Yes — choose with the Listing Type filter. Each record also carries its own listingType.

Can I scrape a specific area or a filtered search? Yes — paste the URL from your browser into Start URLs; the scraper paginates through it.

How many listings can I get? As many as you like. Set Max Items to 0 for unlimited, or cap it to control run time.

Is the data complete without detail mode? The listing view already includes title, rent, location, postcode, property type, advertiser role, availability, verified flag and photo count. Turn on Scrape Detail Pages to add descriptions, per-room rents, household, bills, preferences and photos.

What formats can I export? JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML table, RSS and via the Apify API. Connect to Make, Zapier, Google Sheets, webhooks or an MCP server.

How do I keep data fresh? Use Apify Schedules to run hourly, daily or weekly and keep your dataset up to date.

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🔌 Integrations

Results are stored in a standard Apify dataset, so you can:

• Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, RSS.
• Pull data through the Apify API or client libraries.
• Connect to Make, Zapier, Google Sheets, Slack, webhooks and more.
• Use it from an MCP server in your AI agent / LLM workflow.
• Chain it into your own Actors and pipelines.

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📇 Tips for best results

• Start with a small Max Items to preview the data, then scale up.
• Combine Locations with rent filters to build tightly targeted datasets.
• Enable Scrape Detail Pages for household, bills and preference data — it's fast and inexpensive here.
• Keep the default Datacenter proxy; it's fast and low-cost for this site.

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⚖️ Legal & responsible use

This scraper collects publicly available information only — the same listings any visitor can see on SpareRoom without logging in. It does not access private messages, contact phone numbers behind logins, or anything requiring authentication.

You are responsible for how you use the collected data. Please:

• Respect SpareRoom's Terms of Service and applicable laws (including UK GDPR).
• Use any personal data lawfully and only for legitimate purposes.
• Scrape responsibly and avoid excessive request rates.

This tool is provided for lawful purposes such as market research, analytics and business intelligence. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to SpareRoom.