Co-Star Real Estate Scraper

What does CoStar Real Estate Scraper do?

CoStar Real Estate Scraper extracts structured data from publicly available CoStar News GB articles. It is built for users who need UK commercial real estate news data focused on transactions, developments, financings, sales, and lettings.

This Actor does not scrape private CoStar subscriber listings or authenticated inventory. It works with public CoStar news pages and turns article content into a clean dataset that can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML, or accessed through the Apify API.

Why scrape CoStar real estate news?

CoStar News GB publishes commercial property stories that can be useful for market monitoring, lead generation, investment research, and deal tracking. This CoStar scraper helps you collect those stories in a consistent format without manually opening every article.

Use this Actor to:

• Track UK office, retail, logistics, hotel, mixed-use, and development activity.
• Collect sale, acquisition, financing, refinancing, and letting stories.
• Monitor public news about developers, landlords, investors, occupiers, and agents.
• Build commercial real estate research datasets from public CoStar articles.
• Export results to BI tools, CRMs, spreadsheets, dashboards, or downstream enrichment pipelines.
• Schedule recurring runs on Apify and receive fresh CoStar real estate data automatically.

What CoStar data can this Actor extract?

The exact fields depend on what CoStar exposes publicly in each article. Some articles include a property address and price, while others only expose a company, project, or transaction summary.

Field	Description
propertyId	CoStar article or derived property identifier
url	Public CoStar article URL
listingType	Classified story type: buy, rent, sold, or project
propertyType	Property type when detected, such as office, retail, logistics, hotel, or data centre
address	Parsed address object when a public address is available
price	Publicly mentioned transaction, loan, or investment value
headline	CoStar article headline
description	Short public article description
propertyFeatures	Extracted property and article features, such as square footage or property category
media	Article image count and image URLs
agent / agents	Article author when available
agency	Main company or organization detected from article metadata/text
isBuy, isRent, isSold, isProject	Boolean classification flags
dateUpdated	Article published or modified date when available
matchedSearchTerms	Optional search term matches from your input
scrapedAt	Timestamp when the record was extracted
scrapeStatus	Extraction status

How to scrape CoStar News GB

1. Open the Actor on Apify.
2. Use the default start URL: https://www.costar.com/news/gb.
3. Set maxItems to the number of records you want.
4. Keep strictStoryMode enabled to focus on transaction, development, financing, and letting stories.
5. Keep compactOutput enabled for clean dataset rows.
6. Run the Actor.
7. Download your dataset from the Dataset tab or use the Apify API.

For recurring monitoring, schedule the Actor in Apify Console and export results through integrations, webhooks, or the API.

Input options

Click the Input tab on the Actor page to configure the run. Common settings:

Input	Default	Description
startUrls	https://www.costar.com/news/gb	CoStar News GB section or article URLs to seed the crawl
maxItems	50	Maximum dataset records to store
maxRequestsPerCrawl	200	Request budget for listing pages and article pages
maxPaginationPages	20	Number of CoStar listing/category pages to follow
compactOutput	true	Removes null, empty, and static compatibility fields
strictStoryMode	true	Keeps transaction/development/financing/letting stories and drops people moves or commentary
onlyPropertyArticles	true	Skips generic non-property articles
onlyUkArticles	true	Focuses on UK-related articles in the GB feed
requireAddress	false	Skips records without a public address when enabled
includeArticleBody	true	Includes cleaned article body internally for extraction and matching
includeHtml	false	Stores raw HTML when enabled; increases dataset size
includeFailedRecords	false	Stores blocked/failed requests when enabled
searchTerms	[]	Adds matchedSearchTerms to records that mention your keywords
proxyConfiguration	disabled	Optional Apify Proxy configuration
proxyInitializationTimeoutSecs	30	Maximum time to wait for proxy setup
fallbackToNoProxyOnProxyError	true	Continue without proxy if proxy setup fails or times out

Example input

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.costar.com/news/gb" }],
  "maxItems": 50,
  "maxRequestsPerCrawl": 200,
  "maxPaginationPages": 20,
  "compactOutput": true,
  "strictStoryMode": true,
  "onlyPropertyArticles": true,
  "onlyUkArticles": true,
  "requireAddress": false,
  "includeFailedRecords": false,
  "searchTerms": ["office", "retail", "industrial", "London"]
}

Output example

You can download the dataset extracted by this Actor in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML, or RSS format. A compact output item looks like this:

{
  "propertyId": "1864242100",
  "url": "https://www.costar.com/article/1864242100/eastway-estates-buys-11-million-south-kensington-mixed-use-parade",
  "listingType": "buy",
  "propertyType": "mixed-use",
  "address": {
    "street": "18 Bute St",
    "suburb": "London",
    "state": "LND",
    "full": "18 Bute St, London, LND"
  },
  "price": {
    "display": "GBP 11 million"
  },
  "description": "South Kensington mixed-use parade changes hands",
  "headline": "Eastway Estates buys GBP 11 million South Kensington mixed-use parade",
  "media": {
    "imageCount": 1,
    "images": ["https://costar.brightspotcdn.com/path/to/image.jpg"]
  },
  "agent": {
    "name": "CoStar News author",
    "role": "author"
  },
  "agency": {
    "name": "Eastway Estates"
  },
  "isBuy": true,
  "isRent": false,
  "isSold": false,
  "isProject": false,
  "dateUpdated": "2026-06-05T12:00:00.000Z",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T21:00:00.000Z",
  "source": "CoStar News GB",
  "scrapeStatus": "ok",
  "matchedSearchTerms": ["London"]
}

CoStar scraper filtering and deduplication

This Actor is designed to produce a clean dataset rather than a raw dump of every news article.

It filters out:

• People moves and hiring stories.
• General commentary and market opinion articles.
• Non-UK articles in the GB feed.
• Generic articles without property, transaction, or development signals.
• Duplicate records by article ID, canonical URL, and content fingerprint.

The Actor writes a RUN-SUMMARY record to the default key-value store with counters for discovered, queued, skipped, pushed, blocked, failed, duplicate-suppressed, and content-duplicate-suppressed records. This makes it easier to understand why the number of processed requests is higher than the number of dataset rows.

How much does it cost to scrape CoStar News GB?

A default run with maxItems=50 has recently cost about $0.06 in Apify platform usage without proxy. Actual cost can change depending on website response speed, max item count, retry rate, and whether you enable proxy.

Approximate default-run cost observed:

• Compute: about $0.043
• Request queue operations: about $0.017
• Key-value store writes: about $0.001
• Proxy: $0.000 when disabled

Residential proxy can increase cost. Keep proxy disabled unless you see blocked requests or need it for your environment.

Proxy and blocking

The Actor works without proxy in recent test runs. Apify Proxy is optional.

Use proxy only when:

• CoStar blocks requests in your Apify run.
• You see blocked pages or anti-bot responses.
• Your run fails before articles are processed.

If you enable Apify Proxy from the input UI, the Actor supports the Apify Console proxy shape and normalizes apifyProxyGroups to the SDK groups option internally. For residential proxy, use:

{
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

Make sure your Apify account has access to the selected proxy group.

If proxy initialization fails or times out, the Actor falls back to direct connection by default and records the proxy state in RUN-SUMMARY. Set fallbackToNoProxyOnProxyError=false if you want the run to fail instead whenever proxy cannot be initialized.

Tips for better CoStar real estate data

• Keep strictStoryMode=true for transaction and development datasets.
• Keep compactOutput=true unless you need the full compatibility schema.
• Use searchTerms to tag relevant locations, companies, or property types.
• Leave requireAddress=false for better coverage, because valid finance and development stories may not expose a public address.
• Set requireAddress=true only when every output record must include an address.
• Increase maxRequestsPerCrawl and maxPaginationPages if you increase maxItems.
• Use scheduling for recurring market monitoring.

Limitations

• This Actor scrapes public CoStar News GB pages only.
• It does not access private CoStar subscriber content.
• It does not scrape authenticated CoStar listing inventory.
• Some fields are inferred from article text because public news pages do not expose a stable property listing schema.
• Some valid transaction, finance, and development stories do not include a public property address.
• Output quality depends on what is available on the public article page at run time.

Is it legal to scrape CoStar News GB?

This Actor extracts publicly available web data from public news pages. You should still make sure your use case complies with applicable laws, CoStar's terms, and data protection rules. If your results contain personal data, process it only when you have a lawful basis and follow relevant regulations such as GDPR.

FAQ

Does this Actor scrape private CoStar listings?

No. It only extracts data from publicly accessible CoStar News GB pages.

Why are some addresses missing?

Some public CoStar articles are about financing, funds, portfolios, companies, or developments where no precise public address is exposed. Keep requireAddress=false for broader coverage, or set it to true to keep only rows with an extracted address.

Why does the Actor process more requests than the number of output rows?

The Actor crawls listing pages, article pages, category pages, and then filters out irrelevant or non-UK articles. The RUN-SUMMARY key-value-store record explains the full funnel.

Can I export CoStar data to CSV or Excel?

Yes. Apify datasets can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML, RSS, or accessed through the Apify API.

Should I use residential proxy?

Not by default. Use proxy only if your run is blocked. Proxy increases cost and is unnecessary when no blocking occurs.

Can this Actor monitor new CoStar property news automatically?

Yes. Use Apify schedules to run it daily, hourly, or on another interval, then connect the dataset to webhooks, integrations, or the Apify API.

Support

If the Actor returns unexpected results, check:

1. The RUN-SUMMARY record in the key-value store.
2. Whether strictStoryMode, onlyUkArticles, or requireAddress filtered out records.
3. Whether CoStar changed its public page structure.
4. Whether proxy is needed for your run environment.

For bugs, feature requests, or custom extraction needs, use the Actor issue/support channel on Apify.