🛏️ SpareRoom UK Scraper

🚀 Export SpareRoom UK roommate and rental listings in seconds. Weekly rent, deposit, postcode, room type, household details, and listing URL in one structured dataset.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-05 · 📊 14 fields per listing · UK-wide coverage · Rooms, studios, 1-bed flats · Live SpareRoom search results

The SpareRoom UK Scraper turns any spareroom.co.uk flatshare search into a clean dataset. Give it a town, city, or postcode, pick a room type, optionally clamp weekly rent, and the actor walks every search-result page and flattens each listing into one row.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
🏠 Renters and students	Compare rooms across multiple cities at once
🧑‍💼 Letting agents	Monitor the local roommate market
📊 Real-estate analysts	Track weekly rent trends per postcode
📰 Journalists	Quantify the UK rental squeeze
👩‍💻 Developers	Mirror SpareRoom listings into your app
🤖 Market researchers	Build training data for rental-price models

📋 What the SpareRoom UK Scraper does

• Builds the SpareRoom flatshare search URL from your location, room type, and rent bounds.
• Walks every result page until your maxItems cap or the end of results.
• Parses each listing card for title, weekly rent, location, room type, and listing URL.
• Detects the postcode from the location text when present.
• Surfaces upstream errors as a clean record rather than crashing.
• Emits records ready for download in tabular and structured formats.

💡 Why it matters: SpareRoom is the dominant UK roommate marketplace, but its data is locked behind a paginated HTML search. This actor flattens the catalog into one tidy dataset.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon.

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
searchLocation	string	No	City, town, or postcode. Prefill London.
maxItems	integer	No	Free 10, paid up to 1,000,000.
roomType	enum	No	any, single, double, twin, studio, 1bed, ensuite.
minRent	integer	No	Min weekly rent in GBP.
maxRent	integer	No	Max weekly rent in GBP.

Example 1, London double rooms under £300pw:

{ "searchLocation": "London", "roomType": "double", "maxRent": 300, "maxItems": 100 }

Example 2, Manchester en-suite rooms:

{ "searchLocation": "Manchester", "roomType": "ensuite", "maxItems": 50 }

⚠️ Good to Know: SpareRoom returns the strongest matches first. If a search returns fewer pages than you expect, broaden the area or relax the rent filter.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
🏠 title	string	Listing headline.
💷 weekly_rent	number	Weekly rent in GBP.
💰 deposit	number	Deposit if shown on the card.
📍 location	string	Area or neighborhood text.
📮 postcode	string	UK postcode if detected.
🛏️ room_type	string	Single, double, en-suite, studio, etc.
📅 available_from	string	Availability date as listed.
⏳ min_term	string	Minimum tenancy term.
👥 household_size	string	People already living there.
⚧️ gender_pref	string	Gender preference of the household.
🚬 smoker_pref	string	Smoker preference.
🔗 url	string	Listing URL on spareroom.co.uk.
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp.
❌ error	string	Set if upstream errored.

Sample record:

{
  "title": "Double room in Camden",
  "weekly_rent": 240,
  "deposit": null,
  "location": "Camden Town, NW1",
  "postcode": "NW1",
  "room_type": "Double room",
  "available_from": "Now",
  "min_term": null,
  "household_size": null,
  "gender_pref": null,
  "smoker_pref": null,
  "url": "https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/flatshare_detail.pl?flatshare_id=12345678",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T13:00:00.000Z",
  "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

| 🇬🇧 | UK-wide coverage, any town or postcode. | | 🧹 | Clean numeric rent column ready for analysis. | | 🛟 | Returns a clean error record on upstream blocks rather than crashing. | | 🔢 | Postcode auto-detected from the location string. | | 🏘️ | Filter by room type and rent bounds. | | 💾 | Push to dataset, then download in tabular or structured formats. |

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Setup time	Pagination	Numeric rent
Manual copy-paste	Hours per city	Manual	Manual
Roll your own scraper	4 hours plus	DIY	DIY
This Actor	5 sec, no install	Automatic	Yes

🚀 How to use

1. Click Try for free.
2. Type a city, town, or postcode.
3. Optionally pick a room type and rent bounds.
4. Click Start. The dataset is ready in seconds.

💼 Business use cases

🏘️ Letting agent intel. Track competitor inventory in your operating area daily.

📊 Market reports. Build rent-by-postcode datasets for client briefings.

📰 Newsroom analytics. Quantify how the rental squeeze shifts week to week.

🤖 ML training. Train rent-prediction models on real listing data.

🔌 Automating SpareRoom UK Scraper

• Make and Zapier, push new listings to Slack, Airtable, or Google Sheets.
• Cron schedule, native Apify scheduler runs the search every morning.
• Webhooks, get a POST when the run finishes.
• Pipe to BigQuery, Snowflake, or Postgres, native Apify integrations move datasets straight into your warehouse.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

🎓 Education. Use real housing-market data in coursework.

🧪 Personal research. Compare neighborhoods before moving.

🤝 Non-profit. Map affordability gaps across UK cities.

🧰 Tinkering. Prototype a rental aggregator without writing a scraper.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Drop this README into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant and ask it to map your specific workflow to the actor's inputs.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Is this scraping or API? HTML scraping of the public SpareRoom search.

❓ How fresh is the data? As fresh as SpareRoom serves it. The actor runs the live search.

❓ Are rents normalised? Yes, rent is parsed as a number in GBP, weekly basis.

❓ Can I search by postcode? Yes, full or partial UK postcode works.

❓ Does it follow individual listing pages? Not by default. Card-level fields only for speed.

❓ How are errors handled? Upstream errors become a clean record with error populated.

❓ Will the schema change? Card-level fields are stable. New fields are added as the site exposes them.

❓ Can I schedule runs? Yes, use Apify's native scheduler or Make and Zapier.

❓ What download formats are supported? All formats Apify dataset export supports.

❓ Is residential proxying used? Yes, UK residential proxies are used by default for clean access.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Apify ships native integrations with Make, Zapier, Slack, Discord, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Gmail, Airbyte, Keboola, Telegram, GitHub, and any REST API or webhook endpoint.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for 900+ production-grade scrapers across business intelligence, real estate, e-commerce, sports, finance, and public records.

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