Housing.com Listings Scraper

A production-minded, API-first Apify Actor for public Housing.com buy and rent listings. It uses Housing.com's structured GraphQL responses and does not launch a browser, keeping runs fast and inexpensive.

Use it for property-market research, inventory monitoring, price comparisons, broker and developer analysis, scheduled exports, and real-estate datasets.

What you get

• Easy city search for 12 major Indian markets, with buy and rent selection.
• Advanced canonical-URL mode that preserves filters already encoded by Housing.com.
• Optional minimum/maximum price and listing-age filters.
• Correct multi-page extraction with global listing-ID deduplication.
• A stable schema for projects, resale listings, buy listings, and rentals.
• Useful default data without per-listing requests: prices, locations, areas, configurations, images, dates, tags, features, and trust/status flags.
• Optional detail enrichment for deeper addresses, descriptions, amenities, RERA details, nearby places, floor plans, and sellers.
• Incremental dataset writes, transparent run statistics, conservative retries, and Apify Proxy support.

Input modes

Choose exactly one mode per run.

Easy city mode

{
  "cities": ["bengaluru", "mumbai"],
  "transactionTypes": ["buy", "rent"],
  "minPrice": 2000000,
  "maxPrice": 20000000,
  "daysOld": 30,
  "maxItems": 500,
  "maxPagesPerSearch": 40,
  "maxImages": 6,
  "enrichDetails": false
}

Supported city values are mumbai, bengaluru, hyderabad, pune, chennai, new-delhi, gurgaon, noida, kolkata, ahmedabad, thane, and navi-mumbai. Common aliases such as Bangalore, Delhi, Gurugram, and Calcutta are also accepted through API input.

City mode creates one search for each city and transaction-type combination and validates the city returned by Housing.com before continuing.

Exact URL mode

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://housing.com/in/buy/searches/M8vP38f9yfbk7p3m2h1f" }
  ],
  "maxItems": 100,
  "enrichDetails": false
}

Supported URL patterns:

• Buy: https://housing.com/in/buy/searches/<HASH>
• Rent: https://housing.com/rent/search-<HASH>

Friendly locality, project, and SEO URLs are rejected with a clear error. The Actor never silently falls back to expensive browser automation.

Input reference

• cities: supported cities for easy mode.
• transactionTypes: buy, rent, or both; defaults to both in city mode.
• startUrls: canonical hashed Housing.com search URLs for exact-search mode.
• maxItems: maximum matching unique listings saved across the whole run; default 100.
• minPrice / maxPrice: optional overlapping price-range filter in INR.
• daysOld: optional maximum listing age in days. Records without a usable posted date are excluded when active.
• maxPagesPerSearch: safety/cost cap per generated search or URL; default 40.
• maxImages: maximum property and floor-plan URLs retained per listing; default 6, maximum 50.
• enrichDetails: request deeper listing data after cheap filters have passed.
• includeRaw: include parsed search and detail records under raw.
• proxyConfiguration: standard Apify Proxy or custom proxy configuration.
• maxConcurrency: concurrent detail requests from 1 to 5; search pages remain sequential.

maxItems counts emitted unique IDs, not raw API rows. Duplicate and filtered rows do not consume the result limit. Price ranges match when the listing range overlaps the requested range.

Output

Every record uses the same null-preserving structure. Important field groups include:

• Identity: id, originalId, url, source, searchUrl, scrapedAt.
• Classification: transactionType, propertyType, title, subtitle, projectName, saleType.
• Price: price, pricePerArea.
• Location: address, subAddress, longAddress, city, locality, sublocality, housingRegion, IDs, state, and coordinates.
• Property: bedrooms, bedroomOptions, bathrooms, built-up/carpet area, furnishing, floor, parking, balcony, facing, age, possession, and construction status.
• Media: cover image, source image count, property images, floor plans, video tour, and brochure.
• Trust and status: verification/certification, RERA, MyGate, exclusivity, brokerage, recency, activity, and promotion flags.
• Dates and discovery: postedAt, updatedAt, display date, property/source tags, feature labels, rating, labels, and badges.
• Parties and enrichment: developer, sellers, configurations, amenities, nearby places, highlights, and description.

Unavailable scalar values remain null; unavailable collections are empty arrays. The Actor does not invent values. For a multi-configuration project, bedrooms remains null and all known values appear in bedroomOptions and configurations.

Detail enrichment and cost

The default mode uses roughly one request per 30 raw rows. Detail enrichment adds approximately one request per matching emitted listing. Filters run before enrichment, so rejected listings do not incur detail requests.

Enable enrichment when you need the deepest available descriptions, overview attributes, amenities, nearby places, sellers, RERA/configuration data, or full listing media. Housing.com does not publish every field for every property, so enrichment improves coverage but cannot guarantee every nullable field.

Proxy and reliability

A proxy is not required for typical smaller runs. By default, proxyConfiguration.useApifyProxy is false, so the Actor connects directly and still applies conservative request spacing, retries, jittered exponential backoff, and block detection. Without a proxy, however, retries use the same outgoing IP address.

Enable Apify Proxy for larger, repeated, scheduled, or detail-enriched runs, or if a run reports HTTP 403, HTTP 429, blocked requests, or exhausted retries. When Apify Proxy is enabled, the Actor uses sticky sessions for pagination and can attempt an Indian residential proxy after a detected block if residential proxies are available to the account running the Actor.

Apify Proxy does not require manually entering proxy credentials in the Actor input. Proxy availability and usage may affect run cost. Custom proxy URLs are also supported through proxyConfiguration.

Correctness and resilience

• Uses Housing.com's service-specific page flow: buy page 2+ includes meta.pagination_flow: true; rent currently omits it because the rent backend otherwise returns an empty page.
• Validates returned page numbers, page fingerprints, and new IDs.
• Retries one suspicious repeated page with proxy rotation, then stops safely rather than duplicating page 1 forever.
• Uses global deduplication across pages, URLs, cities, and transaction targets.
• Uses conservative spacing, jittered exponential backoff, block detection, sticky pagination sessions, and rotated retries.
• Attempts an Indian residential proxy after a block when Apify Proxy and account access allow it.
• Continues with base data when an individual detail request fails.
• Writes RUN_STATS to the default key-value store even when a run fails.

Run diagnostics include searches planned/completed, pages fetched, raw rows, unique rows examined, filtered rows, duplicates, emitted rows, detail outcomes, retries, blocks, search failures, pagination stops, page-cap stops, city validation failures, and timing.

Verification

The automated suite covers four-page pagination, cross-page and cross-search duplicates, unique-result limits, city discovery and aliases, price/date filtering before details, maximum-page stops, independent enrichment, malformed/unsupported input, empty results, repeated-page protection, 403, 429, timeouts, malformed JSON, retry backoff, and residential proxy fallback.

Release acceptance on 2026-08-14 retrieved 100 unique Bengaluru buy listings and 100 unique Bengaluru rent listings across four pages each. A separate 20-listing detail run enriched all 20 records successfully. The deployed Apify build then passed a real cloud city-mode smoke test. These checks had no blocks, request retries, search failures, pagination stops, or city-validation failures.

Housing.com uses private frontend contracts that can change. The city catalog and GraphQL field selection are isolated so they can be updated without replacing the crawler architecture.

See ./RESEARCH.md for the technical investigation and ./PARITY_SPEC.md for the competitor-parity scope.