Australian Real Estate Agency Directory Scraper

This Actor collects real-estate agency directory records from public OpenStreetMap data for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. It returns agencies and their mapped locations; it does not scrape property listings. The primary query uses Overpass nwr selectors for nodes, ways, and relations. If Overpass fails or returns no agencies, the Actor uses a rate-limited Nominatim fallback.

Input

• cities: supported Australian search areas.
• maxItems: maximum unique OSM agencies to save.
• preferOverpass: query Overpass first; set false to use Nominatim only.
• overpassEndpoint: fixed public Overpass endpoint (https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter); other hosts and paths are rejected.
• timeoutMs: timeout for each OSM request.

Output

Records retain flat fields for compatibility and add nested agency, osm, location, contact, and provenance objects. osm.tags contains the tags returned by the selected source; Nominatim may return only extratags, so its category/type classification is normalized separately to agency.officeType without being presented as a raw tag. address is populated only when OSM address tags include both a house number and street. A nearby Nominatim label is stored separately as geocoderDisplayName; it must not be read as a confirmed agency address. city is populated only when the geocoder returns a city value, while sourceCity identifies the requested search area.

The browserVerification object appears only on saved rows that were manually checked in Chrome; it is review metadata, not a claim that every Actor-run record received a browser review.

Overpass access restrictions and rate limits stop collection without a Nominatim retry. Network/service failures and valid empty Overpass results may use the documented, rate-limited Nominatim fallback. OUTPUT.recordCount and OUTPUT.successfulItems are run-local counts; the default dataset can also contain records from earlier runs.

Synthetic output example

The values below are synthetic and show structure only. They are not a current OSM record.

{
  "recordType": "agency-directory",
  "osmType": "node",
  "osmId": 1001,
  "name": "Example Realty",
  "city": "Sydney",
  "state": "New South Wales",
  "country": "Australia",
  "postcode": "2000",
  "address": "Unit 4 12 Example Road",
  "geocoderDisplayName": "12 Example Road, Sydney, 2000",
  "latitude": -33.86,
  "longitude": 151.21,
  "website": "https://example.invalid",
  "email": "hello@example.invalid",
  "phone": "+61 2 0000 0000",
  "openingHours": "Mo-Fr 09:00-17:00",
  "sourceCity": "Sydney",
  "sourceMode": "overpass-nwr",
  "sourceUrl": "https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z",
  "agency": {
    "name": "Example Realty",
    "officeType": "estate_agent",
    "operator": "Example Realty Group",
    "checkDate": "2026-09-01",
    "localizedNames": { "zh": "示例地产" }
  },
  "osm": {
    "type": "node",
    "id": 1001,
    "url": "https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1001",
    "tags": {
      "name": "Example Realty",
      "office": "estate_agent",
      "addr:unit": "4",
      "addr:housenumber": "12",
      "addr:street": "Example Road",
      "addr:postcode": "2000"
    }
  },
  "location": {
    "latitude": -33.86,
    "longitude": 151.21,
    "address": {
      "unit": "4",
      "houseNumber": "12",
      "street": "Example Road",
      "postcode": "2000",
      "formatted": "Unit 4 12 Example Road"
    },
    "city": "Sydney",
    "locality": null,
    "state": "New South Wales",
    "country": "Australia",
    "postcode": "2000",
    "postcodeSource": "osm-tag",
    "geocoderDisplayName": "12 Example Road, Sydney, 2000"
  },
  "contact": {
    "website": "https://example.invalid",
    "email": "hello@example.invalid",
    "phone": "+61 2 0000 0000",
    "openingHours": "Mo-Fr 09:00-17:00"
  },
  "provenance": {
    "provider": "OpenStreetMap",
    "attribution": "© OpenStreetMap contributors",
    "sourceMode": "overpass-nwr",
    "sourceCity": "Sydney",
    "sourceUrl": "https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter",
    "objectUrl": "https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1001",
    "retrievedAt": "2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z"
  }
}

Verification and attribution

The five saved Sydney rows were compared with their exact OSM object pages in connected Chrome on 2026-09-27. Their historical scrapedAt values remain unchanged. See BROWSER_REVIEW.md. OSM content is attributed to © OpenStreetMap contributors; the public OSM object URL is retained in each record.

Run status

OUTPUT.status and runStatus are SUCCEEDED or FAILED. Valid empty responses complete successfully. If Overpass fails and fallback records are saved, the run remains SUCCEEDED with collectionStatus: PARTIAL; source or dataset failures with zero saved agency rows report FAILED. recordCount and successfulItems count records saved by this run, while the local dataset can also contain rows from earlier runs. Failures are logged, never emitted as diagnostic or placeholder dataset rows.