SpareRoom UK & US Room / Flatshare Rental Listings Scraper

Extract room and flatshare listings from SpareRoom — the UK's largest room-share marketplace (spareroom.co.uk) and its US counterpart (spareroom.com). A run returns both rooms-to-rent ("offered") and room-seeker ("wanted") ads across every UK town and US state/metro SpareRoom lists, with the household-composition detail — housemates, age range, gender mix, couples/smoking/pets policy, minimum term, live-in-landlord vs agent — that a rent price alone doesn't tell you.

What does the SpareRoom Scraper do?

• Crawls both national sites in one run: UK (spareroom.co.uk) and US (spareroom.com) — the two are separate hosts with the same listing format.
• Covers both ad types: offered (a room or property available now) and wanted (a room-seeker describing what they're looking for).
• Reaches every UK town/city and every US state/metro SpareRoom's own site index lists, following the site's own borough/district breakdown for oversized cities (London, Los Angeles, ...) so a single high-volume city doesn't cap the run early.
• Returns the household-composition fields most listing scrapers skip: current housemate count, age range, gender mix, occupation preference, couples/smoking/pets policy, minimum and maximum tenancy term, and whether the advertiser is a live-in landlord, an agent, or a current tenant.
• Normalises rent into a single per-calendar-month figure (rent_pcm_normalised) alongside the as-listed amount and period, so a £200 pw room and a £900 pcm room are directly comparable without a cleanup pass.

What data does it extract?

Field	Description
listing_id	SpareRoom's own numeric ad reference
listing_url	Direct link to the listing
country	UK or US
title	Ad headline
ad_type	offered (room available) or wanted (room-seeker)
property_type	Flat share, house share, studio, whole property, etc.
room_type	Single, double, twin, en-suite, etc.
rent_amount	As-listed rent
rent_currency	GBP or USD
rent_period	pw (per week) or pcm (per calendar month) as listed
rent_pcm_normalised	Rent converted to a single per-calendar-month figure
bills_included	Whether bills are included in the rent
deposit_amount	Deposit, when listed
available_from	Move-in date or availability text
minimum_term_months / maximum_term_months	Tenancy term bounds, when listed
area	Neighbourhood/borough (UK) or the areas a wanted-ad seeker is looking in
postcode_district	UK outcode or US ZIP, when listed
city	The top-level town/city/metro the listing was found under
latitude / longitude	Listing coordinates, when the page exposes them
nearest_station / station_distance	Nearest transit station and walk time (offered ads)
rooms_available	Number of room slots on the ad
housemates_total	Current number of people in the household, when listed
housemate_genders	Gender mix of the current household, when listed
age_range	Age range of the current household, when listed
occupation_preference	Preference for the incoming flatmate (professional/student/any)
couples_ok / smoking_ok / pets_ok	Household policy flags, when listed
furnishing	Furnished / unfurnished
amenities	Comma-separated amenities (parking, garden, wifi, ...)
advertiser_name	Advertiser's display name
advertiser_type	Live-in landlord, landlord, agent, or current tenant
is_agent_listing	true when the advertiser is a letting agent
photo_urls	Comma-separated listing photo URLs
photos_count	Number of photos on the ad
description	Full ad description text
first_listed_at	Approximate first-listed date, derived from the site's own "days on site" counter
scraped_at	When this record was collected

Two fields aren't emitted: SpareRoom exposes no direct link to an advertiser's public profile (contact happens through the ad itself), and the site never renders a last-modified date for a listing — only the advertiser's own last-active time, which describes them, not the ad.

How to use it

The default run covers the full corpus: both countries, both ad types, every town/city and state/metro SpareRoom's own site lists. Set maxItems to control how many listings you retrieve.

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum listings to return across the whole run

Use cases

• Co-living and build-to-rent underwriting — model shared-accommodation demand and pricing using household composition, minimum term, and normalised rent across UK towns and US metros.
• Rent index / market research — track per-room pricing (not whole-property) by city and neighbourhood, the segment portal-wide listing scrapers don't reach.
• Relocation and corporate housing desks — price shared accommodation for relocating employees against rent_pcm_normalised, area, and household policy fields (couples, smoking, pets).
• Academic and demand research — study the room-share segment's household composition trends across two national markets in one dataset.

FAQ

Does this cover both rooms-to-rent and people looking for a room? Yes. ad_type is offered for rooms/properties available and wanted for room-seeker ads. Wanted ads carry rent budget, availability, and the areas the seeker is looking in; property-specific fields (property type, postcode, station distance) only apply to offered ads and are left empty on wanted ads, since SpareRoom's own wanted-ad pages don't describe a property.

Why is rent_pcm_normalised sometimes different from rent_amount? rent_amount/rent_period are the figures exactly as SpareRoom lists them — some ads are priced per week (pw), most per calendar month (pcm). rent_pcm_normalised converts a per-week rent to its calendar-month equivalent so ads on different pricing bases are directly comparable; a pcm ad's normalised figure equals its listed rent.

Why are some household-composition fields empty on a listing? SpareRoom only publishes current-household detail (housemate count, age range, gender mix) on ads for a room within an existing household. Whole-property and new-build listings don't have an existing household to describe, so those fields are empty on those ads — this is genuine to the source, not a gap in the scrape.

Is it legal to scrape SpareRoom? SpareRoom listing data is publicly accessible without login. This actor retrieves the same information a browser user would see. Users are responsible for ensuring their downstream use of the data complies with SpareRoom's terms of service and applicable laws.

Results are available for export in JSON, CSV, and Excel formats from the Apify dataset tab.