#Flatfinder helps you to find a flat.
If you have ever tried to find a decent apartment in a popular city like Berlin, you know that you have to be quick. Very quick. When there is a new ad you have to make contact within a few minutes, if you want to get an invitation to visit the advertised flat.
Flatfinder checks the real estate websites of your choice once or twice a minute and notifies you via email or iOS push message, as soon as it finds a new ad. You don't have to sit in front of your computer to find a flat, let Flatfinder do this for you!
This script helped me to find my awesome flat, so it can help you to!
Please note, you should see this project more as a starting point for your own script. I doubt that mine will work out of the box for you.
You need:
- A server to run this script 24/7. Or an old computer that is always on.
- A new email address. You will get a lot of messages (up to hundreds of mails a day), so do yourself a favour and get a special mail account for this. Also you need to know the SMTP settings.
- Specific URLs of the real estate websites (more about this later on)
- Optional: A Prowl account to receive iOS messages
Edit the configuration file to enter all the details.
Currently this script supports these german websites:
- WG-Gesucht (1-Zimmer Wohnung)
- WG-Gesucht
- Immowelt
- ImmobilienScout24
- Immonet
- eBay Kleinanzeigen
- Wohnungsboerse
Take the URL from the example configuration file and visit the website. Now change the filter etc. to your needs, but make sure that the layout stays exactly the same. Otherwise the script will not be able to find any ads. Then copy/paste your own URL into your config file.
If you want this script to support your website of choice, first edit Configuration.py and your configuration file. Make sure you add it to the self.URLs dictionary.
The more difficult part is fetching the needed information from the HTML code of the requested website. Add a function to WebsiteParser.py, that returns the title, link, rent, location and the request time of the newly found ad. You can use an HTML parser like BeautifulSoup to do this or an regex.