HomeStars.ca Scraper

Scrape Canadian home-service businesses — plumbers, HVAC, electricians, roofers, contractors — from HomeStars.ca, Canada's largest home-services review platform.

Why this actor exists

If you sell to Canadian trades — HVAC contractors, plumbers, electricians, roofers, drywallers, renovation companies — HomeStars is the cleanest single source of targeted B2B contact data. It indexes ~50 000 verified service businesses across ~3 000 city+profession combinations, each with a verified license, phone number, and (when published) website. Google Maps' coverage of these same businesses is uneven; the bigger, review-rich pros often live on HomeStars in addition to (or instead of) Maps.

This actor pulls phone number, social links, website, full company bio, ratings, review counts, HomeStars badges, professions, locality, and verification status for every business in the directory — ready to drop into a CRM, outreach sequence, or enrichment pipeline.

Typical users:

• B2B sales targeting trades (SaaS, insurance, fleet/equipment, financing, marketing services).
• Lead-gen and list-resellers building Canadian trade lists by profession and metro.
• Recruiting for skilled-trades hiring.
• Market research on review/badge density by city and trade.

The records describe the businesses themselves — homeowner reviewers are not scraped.

Quick start

{
  "mode": "all_listings",
  "cities": ["toronto-ontario", "kitchener-ontario"],
  "professions": ["plumber-pros", "hvac-pros"],
  "maxConcurrency": 5,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
    "apifyProxyCountry": "CA"
  }
}

This fetches every plumber and HVAC profile in Toronto and Kitchener.

Modes

Mode	What it does	Cost driver
all_listings (default)	Walks listing sitemap, paginates each directory, fetches every profile. Most complete output.	Per-profile + per-listing-card charges
listings_only	Same crawl, but stops at listing cards. Output is the card snippet only (name, slug, locality, profession, rating, logo). ~30× cheaper, fewer fields.	Per-listing-card charges only
profiles_only	Skips directories. Hits the service_pros sitemap directly and pulls every pro's profile in one pass. Fastest path to a full national dataset. The cities filter is ignored in this mode — profile URLs carry no location info; filter post-hoc on the city field of the output.	Per-profile charges only

Example output (profile record)

Real data from Local Heating And Cooling, a 5-star Kitchener HVAC contractor, 122 reviews, BEST_OF_AWARD winner 2026:

{
  "slug": "2913450-local-heating-and-cooling",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.homestars.com/profile/2913450-local-heating-and-cooling",
  "companyName": "Local Heating And Cooling",
  "phone": "+15198848888",
  "websiteUrl": "https://localheatingcooling.com",
  "facebookUrl": "https://www.facebook.com/localheatingandcooling/",
  "instagramUrl": "https://instagram.com/local_heating_and_cooling?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=",
  "linkedinUrl": null,
  "youtubeUrl": null,
  "rating": 10,
  "ratingOutOfFive": 5,
  "reviewsCount": 122,
  "locality": "Kitchener, Ontario",
  "city": "Kitchener",
  "province": "Ontario",
  "professions": [
    "HVAC contractor", "Electrician", "Handyman", "Plumber", "Cleaning company",
    "Appliance repair specialist", "Excavation Specialist", "Refrigeration specialist",
    "Renewable Energy Specialist", "Home Electronics Specialist",
    "Fireplace and BBQ Specialist"
  ],
  "verifications": ["VALID_ID", "VERIFIED_LICENSE"],
  "badges": [
    { "badgeType": "VERIFICATION_BADGE",    "winningYear": 2022, "winCount": 1 },
    { "badgeType": "BEST_OF_THE_BEST_AWARD","winningYear": 2025, "winCount": 1 },
    { "badgeType": "BEST_OF_AWARD",         "winningYear": 2026, "winCount": 7 }
  ],
  "logoUrl": "https://www.homestars.com/images/sp/thumbnail_medium/6a8a78d0-eb98-5777-ad14-ba009463f852.jpg",
  "companyBio": "Visit our local showroom! 47 Bridge St E Unit 10 Kitchener. Whether you need a new furnace…",
  "isApproved": true,
  "warrantyIsProvided": false,
  "ableToInteract": true,
  "firstAbleToInteractAt": "2018-08-20T00:00:00+00:00",
  "sourceListingUrl": "https://www.homestars.com/heating-and-cooling/hvac-pros/kitchener-ontario",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-12T01:06:11.147Z"
}

Pricing

This actor uses pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for results, not compute time.

Event	Price	When it fires
profile_scraped	$0.008	One per profile pushed to the dataset (modes: all_listings, profiles_only)
listing_business_scraped	$0.003	One per business card on a listing page (all modes)

Worked examples:

• Full Toronto plumbers harvest (~600 pros across ~25 listing pages): ~600 × $0.008 + ~600 × $0.003 = ~$6.60
• National profiles-only sweep (~50 000 pros): 50 000 × $0.008 = ~$400
• Listings-only sweep of all 3 000 city+profession combos (~30 cards each): 90 000 × $0.003 = ~$270

Apify proxy traffic and platform usage are billed separately on Apify's side, as with any actor.

Filters

• cities — Lowercased city slugs as they appear in HomeStars URLs (e.g. kitchener-ontario, toronto-ontario). Match is substring; pass toronto to match toronto-ontario, north-york-toronto, etc. Ignored in profiles_only mode.
• professions — Lowercased profession slugs (e.g. plumber-pros, hvac-pros, electrician-pros, roofer-pros).
• maxListings / maxProfilesPerListing / maxPagesPerListing — Hard caps to bound run cost during testing.

What's not included

• Email addresses. HomeStars hides business email behind a lead-gen form; it isn't exposed in their public page state. We confirmed this against multiple profile dumps. Use the phone number and website to reach the business.
• Full review text. Each profile carries the latest 5 reviews in its Apollo cache, but we don't extract them — they don't have a stable per-business uplift and bloat the dataset. If you need them, file a feature request.
• Project / portfolio photos. HomeStars loads these client-side from a separate endpoint, so capturing them would mean a second request per profile. Out of scope for v0.1; ask if you need it.
• Email-reveal simulation. This actor does not impersonate consumer accounts to trigger HomeStars's "Send message" flow.

How it compares

Need	Use this	Or
Contact data for Canadian trade businesses with HomeStars-verified ratings	HomeStars Scraper	—
Generic local-business directory with Maps presence	Google Maps Scraper	this actor for HomeStars-exclusive businesses
US home services	Yelp Scraper	—

HomeStars is the only large directory where HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and renovation pros submit verified-license documentation to get a VERIFIED_LICENSE badge — that field doesn't exist anywhere else in the Canadian directory landscape.

Notes / known quirks

• Pagination format. HomeStars's listing pagination uses ?page=N query parameters. The actor includes a runtime self-check: if page 2 returns the same first business as page 1, it automatically retries with the path-based /page/N/ variant. You should not need to do anything, but watch the logs for Pagination drift detected on the first run if you're worried.
• Cloudflare. HomeStars is fronted by Cloudflare with managed challenge. Residential CA proxies clear it without issue; data-center proxies will get blocked.
• Rating scale. The rating field is on a 0–10 scale (matching HomeStars's internal Apollo cache). ratingOutOfFive is rating / 2 for convenience — that's what HomeStars displays publicly.