Realestate.com.au Property Scraper

Scrape property listings from Australia's largest real estate portal — Realestate.com.au. Extract comprehensive property data including addresses, prices, bedrooms, bathrooms, parking, land size, agent details, inspection times, and listing images. Perfect for property market research, investment analysis, and lead generation.

Summary

The Realestate.com.au Property Scraper is a production-grade Apify actor that extracts property listings from realestate.com.au, the most visited real estate website in Australia with over 11 million monthly visitors. This actor allows you to search by any suburb, postcode, or region, filter by property type (buy, rent, or sold), set price ranges, and receive clean structured JSON output ready for analysis, spreadsheets, or your own database.

Built on Crawlee's CheerioCrawler for fast, lightweight scraping with automatic proxy rotation through Apify's residential proxy network, this actor handles anti-bot measures, rate limiting, and pagination automatically. It uses multiple CSS selector fallbacks to maintain reliability even when Realestate.com.au updates their frontend markup.

How It Works

1. Input Parsing: The actor accepts your search parameters — location (suburb/postcode), property type, price range, and maximum results.
2. URL Construction: It builds the correct Realestate.com.au search URL with your filters applied.
3. Proxy Rotation: Each request is routed through Apify's residential proxy pool to avoid IP-based blocking and rate limits.
4. Session Management: A Crawlee session pool maintains cookies and headers across requests for consistent results.
5. Data Extraction: The CheerioCrawler parses each listing card using multiple CSS selector fallbacks, extracting all available fields.
6. Pagination: The actor automatically follows pagination links to scrape multiple pages until the max results limit is reached.
7. Output: Data is saved to the Apify dataset in structured JSON format, with error records logged separately for failed requests.

Input Parameters

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
location	string	No	sydney-nsw-2000	Suburb or postcode in realestate.com.au URL format (e.g. melbourne-vic-3000, brisbane-city-qld-4000)
propertyType	string	No	buy	Listing type: buy, rent, or sold
minPrice	integer	No	—	Minimum price filter (e.g. 500000 for $500k)
maxPrice	integer	No	—	Maximum price filter (e.g. 2000000 for $2m)
maxResults	integer	No	100	Maximum number of listings to return (1–500)

Output Example

{
  "address": "42 Example Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010",
  "price": "$1,250,000",
  "beds": 3,
  "baths": 2,
  "parking": 1,
  "landSize": "220m²",
  "propertyType": "Terrace",
  "link": "https://www.realestate.com.au/property-terrace-nsw-surry+hills-123456789",
  "imageUrl": "https://i2.au.reastatic.net/800x600/example.jpg",
  "agent": "John Smith",
  "agency": "Ray White Surry Hills",
  "auctionDate": "Sat 15 Jul, 10:30am",
  "inspectionTimes": "Sat 8 Jul 11:00am - 11:30am",
  "description": "Charming terrace in a sought-after pocket...",
  "suburb": "sydney nsw 2000",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-04T10:30:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

This actor uses Apify's pay-per-result pricing model. You only pay for the listings you successfully extract — no monthly fees, no minimum commitments, and no API key required. The cost depends on the number of results you request and the complexity of residential proxy usage. For a typical run of 100 listings, expect costs in the range of a few cents of Apify platform credits.

Residential proxies are used by default to ensure reliable scraping without blocks. You can switch to datacenter proxies for lower costs by modifying the proxyConfig in the input, though this may impact reliability on Realestate.com.au which has strong anti-bot protections.

Use Cases

• Property Market Research: Track property prices, availability, and trends across Australian suburbs over time. Build datasets for analysis of housing affordability, rental yields, and market movements.
• Lead Generation for Real Estate Agents: Identify properties for sale by owner, expired listings, or under-quoted properties to generate warm leads.
• Rental Market Analysis: Monitor rental prices across suburbs to identify yield hotspots and investment opportunities.
• Suburb Comparison: Compare property counts, median prices, and property types between different suburbs for investment decision-making.
• Automated Property Alerts: Set up recurring runs to monitor new listings matching specific criteria and receive notifications when new properties appear.
• Data Enrichment: Combine property data with demographic, school catchment, and infrastructure datasets for comprehensive area profiling.

FAQ

Q: Do I need a Realestate.com.au account or API key? A: No. This actor scrapes publicly available listing data. No account, API key, or authentication is required.

Q: Can I scrape sold property data? A: Yes. Set propertyType to sold to scrape recently sold properties with their sale prices where available.

Q: What if the site changes its HTML structure? A: The actor uses multiple CSS selector fallbacks for each field. If all selectors fail, the field will be empty rather than causing a crash. Regular updates to selector patterns can be applied via the Apify actor's source code.

Q: How fast is the scraping? A: Using Cheerio (not a headless browser), each page loads in 1–3 seconds. A typical 100-listing run across multiple pages completes in 15–30 seconds depending on proxy speed.

Q: Can I scrape commercial properties? A: Yes. Use propertyType set to buy and search for commercial suburbs or use the commercial keyword. The scraper will extract whatever listings appear on the results page.

Q: Is it legal to scrape Realestate.com.au? A: This actor scrapes publicly available data. You are responsible for complying with Realestate.com.au's terms of service and Australian law. Consider the intended use of the data before running at scale.

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Actor ID: realestate-au-scraper · Runtime: Node.js 20 · Type: CheerioCrawler