Daniel - May 18, 2021
What are the best proxies for scraping Zillow.com? Read this post to find out the unbiased answer.
If you’re a real estate agent, then zillow.com is no stranger to you, and you’ve probably scrapped data of houses for sale or rent in different parts of the US from zillow.com using data scraping bots such as Zillow scraper.
Therefore, in this post, I will be focusing on the importance of using proxies with Zillow scraper to scrape real estate data from zillow.com.
Residential proxies are the best proxies for scraping data on zillow.com because Residential proxies give you the stealth advantage by disguising Zillow scraper activities like regular users.
ProxyRack is the best source of both Residential proxies because ProxyRack provides more than 500,000 premium proxies and can handle almost a billion API requests from thousands of users daily.
ProxyRack is also an ideal source of Datacenter proxies useful for purposes requesting speeds such as online gaming, limited-edition copping, online shopping, etc.
Below are ProxyRack price plans for Datacenter, and Residential proxies
Residential Proxies
Unmetered Residential Proxies: Starting from $80
Premium GEO Residential Proxies: Starting from $14.95
Private Residential Proxies: Starting from $99.95
Datacenter Proxies
USA Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Mixed Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Shared Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $49
Zillow.com is a real estate website that contains listings for sale, rent, or mortgage. It is one of the most popular real estate platforms in the US where users can buy, sell, rent, or mortgage homes.
Additionally, Zillow offers affiliate services, including Zillow Home Loans, Zillow Homes, Zillow Closing services, etc. However, its most popular subsidiary services remain zillow.com, a website of real estate listings.
As a real estate agent, you can use a data scraper bot to gather data on homes available for sale, rent, mortgages, and prices in states across the US.
Hence, your Zillow scraper bots put the data of real estate listings at your fingertips, saving you from countless hours of poring over real estate listings in states across the US. Output from Zillow scraper can be in JSON, Excel, CSV, XML, HTML table, or RSS feed.
Zillow scraper, much like other web scraping bots, are restricted on most websites or are limited in their operations by websites. However, setting up the Zillow scraper with proxies can help the Zillow scraper evade detection while gathering valuable data from websites.
Therefore, irrespective of the type of data you will be collecting from Zillow.com, you will need premium proxies to mask Zillow scraper’s activities.
Other reasons you should use proxies include:
Scrape large volume of data
Most websites, including Zillow, have their rate limits set at 500 requests per hour to discourage scraping large volumes of data. It is humanly impossible to make above 600 requests per hour. Bots, including Zillow scraper, can make thousands of requests per hour, resulting in a temporal IP ban if it is not configured with rotating proxies.
Although it will be helpful to set Zillow scraper to scrape at a slow rate to bypass detection and possible IP banning, using premium rotating proxies is the best solution to bypassing the 500 requests per hour rate limit set by zillow.com and other anti-scraping websites. With rotating proxies, you can set up the Zillow scraper to bypass the rate limit set by Zillow by automatically changing its IP address at regular intervals after making a set number of requests not exceeding the rate limit set by zillow.com.
Enjoy unrestricted access to Zillow
If you live in parts of the world geographically restricted from accessing Zillow, or you want to access location-specific services, using proxies is your best option. With proxies, you can configure Zillow to access data from specific geographical locations or bypass geo-restrictions. E.g., as an agent traveling outside of the US, you can set up the Zillow scraper using US rotating proxies to have unhindered access to Zillow’s services irrespective of your destination outside of the US.
Scrape data securely and anonymously
Scraping data with Zillow scraper configured with proxies masks your identifying information such as IP address, location, etc., from Zillow and unauthorized third parties. Thus you remain anonymous online while your data and browsing remain protected from hackers and third-party browser cookies tracking your browsing activities.
Zillow scraper is the best way of gathering data of real estate listings on zillow.com. However, you will need to configure your Zillow scraper with proxies to help it bypass the rate limit and other antibot mechanisms set by most websites.
Nevertheless, both residential and datacenter proxies are suitable for scraping Zillow.