Zillow Price & Zestimate Watch 🏠

Watch specific Zillow listings and get paid-for alerts only when price, Zestimate, or status genuinely change — not a one-shot data dump, and not a bill for every check.

Zillow blocks plain scrapers with a "Press & Hold" challenge. This Actor connects through a real remote browser (your own Bright Data Scraping Browser) to get past it, then remembers what it last saw for each listing so you only pay when something actually moved.

Why this exists

Every existing Zillow Actor on the Store is a one-shot pull: run it, get today's numbers, done. None of them offer a durable monitor that tracks a specific listing over time and only charges for a genuine, new change.

What you need

Nothing but a monitorId and some listing URLs. Zillow's bot defense blocks plain HTTP requests, so a real anti-detect browser is required — this Actor uses a built-in stealth browser by default, with no third-party account or key on your side.

You can still point it at your own remote browser (brightDataCdpUrl, e.g. a Bright Data Scraping Browser) if you prefer. The backend is never switched automatically: whichever you set is what runs, and it is reported in the run's coverage.fetchBackend.

How it works

1. Give it a monitorId and a list of Zillow listing URLs.
2. Each run opens every listing in the stealth browser and compares price/Zestimate/status against what it saw last time for that listing.
3. You pay for a confirmed check (listing-check-confirmed) only when the page genuinely loaded and data was extracted — a failed/blocked/timed-out attempt is never billed to you, even though the browser run it attempted is real and is not refundable.
4. You pay for a change (listing-change-detected) once per field that actually moved since the last confirmed check (price, Zestimate, or status) — checking a listing that stayed the same costs only the check fee, nothing more.

Input

Field	What it does
monitorId	Names this monitor's durable history — required.
listings	1–15 Zillow listing URLs (must contain .../<zpid>_zpid/). New listings can be added later under the same monitorId.
brightDataCdpUrl	Optional. Leave empty to use the built-in stealth browser. If set, never logged or stored in plain form.
notifyOn	new_alerts (default) fires the webhook only when paid changes were delivered.
webhookUrl	HTTPS only; delivers a digest of paid changes as JSON.

Output

• Dataset — one row per delivered change: zpid, which field changed, old/new value, listing URL, timestamp. Unchanged checks don't appear in the Dataset — see run coverage for how many were checked.
• Run status — clear reasons on bad input, a Bright Data connection failure, or a run that ran out of time.

What this does NOT promise

Real-time monitoring (each run is a snapshot at the moment it executes), a guarantee against Zillow changing its page structure or blocking method, or coverage of listings that come off-market entirely (a delisted page may simply stop returning data).

A note on the source

Zillow shows a "Press & Hold" challenge to plain automated requests. This Actor gets past it by connecting to a real remote browser session (your Bright Data Scraping Browser) rather than sending a raw HTTP request — the same reason a real person's browser isn't challenged. Not an official API; Zillow's page structure could change at any time.

What a check actually costs you, in full

Reading Zillow requires driving a real anti-detect browser, and that browser run appears on your Apify bill. Measured on a live run:

line item	per check
this Actor's listing-check-confirmed	see the pricing box above
built-in stealth browser (its own two events)	$0.004
platform compute for that browser run	~$0.036

If you supply your own brightDataCdpUrl instead, you pay that provider directly for the same browser work — the cost does not disappear, it moves off your Apify bill onto theirs. We would rather state this up front than let you find it on an invoice.