Real Estate Listings

Real Estate Listings is a script that helps you keep track of real estate listing changes. In particular, it currently supports mostly Argentinian websites, but it can easily be extended to support other websites as well.

When the script is run, it will iterate over all the provided urls, and notify you for any change that happened, compared to the previous exported version of that website.

The currently supported websites are the following:

Real Estate Listing Site	Single Listing	Listings Search
ZonaProp	✅	✅
ArgenProp	✅	✅
MercadoLibre	✅	✅
CabaProp	✅	✅
EnBuenosAires	✅	✅
Properati	✅	✅
LaGranInmobiliaria	✅	✅
ICasas	✅	✅
LiderProp	✅	✅
MeMudoYa	✅	✅

Real Estate Agency Specific Listing Site	Single Listing	Listings Search
Remax	✅	✅
Maluma	✅
SiGroup	✅
Varcasia	✅
Magnacca	✅
MenendezProp	✅	✅
GrupoMega	✅	✅
Mudafy		✅
Morselli	✅

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you need to have chrome installed in your machine, if you don't have it, or you experience errors running npm install when installing puppeteer, try running the following to install a working Google Chrome version:

# Versions
CHROME_DRIVER_VERSION=`curl -sS chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/LATEST_RELEASE`

# Remove existing downloads and binaries so we can start from scratch.
sudo apt remove google-chrome-stable

# Install dependencies.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y unzip openjdk-8-jre-headless xvfb libxi6 libgconf-2-4

# Install Chrome.
sudo curl -sS -o - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add
echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list
sudo apt -y update
sudo apt -y install google-chrome-stable

You can also try installing chromium if using Ubuntu with WSL

sudo apt install chromium-browser

Installation

Run

npm install

Usage

First you need to create a config.json located at the root. You can start with the defaults doing:

cp config.default.json config.json

{
  "urlsSource": {
    "googleSheet": {
      "enabled": false,
      "credentials": null,
      "spreadsheetId": null
    },
    "files": {
      "enabled": false,
      "files": []
    }
  },
  "browser": {
    "xintelApiKey": "",
    "timeBetweenPageFetchesMs": 16000
  },
  "telegram": {
    "token": "",
    "chatId": ""
  }
}

Where:

• urlsSource - configures where to fetch the urls from:
  • googleSheet - Gets all the urls from all the sheets inside the spreadsheet with id spreadsheetId, by looking up all the columns that have "links" as header. Uses credentials to authenticate as a service account.
  • files - Reads each file in files (path relative to the project folder), line by line and ignores lines that start with "//" or are empty.
• broser - configures how the browser will run and fetch the pages
  • xintelApiKey - apiKey to use when fetching xintel pages
  • timeBetweenPageFetchesMs - Time to wait between each page fetch
• telegram - Telegram configuration used to notify the changes:
  • token - bot token, provided when you create the bot
  • chatId - chat in which you want to receive the notifications. You can retrieve the bot's chats by getting the latest messages, using https://api.telegram.org/bot{TOKEN}/getUpdates

Running in background

Then you can run it using ./scripts/start.sh which will run the app in background and notify of any change.

Running in foreground

Simply run ./src/main.js --diff-check

Run the app periodically

If you want to run the app periodically, you could set up a cron like this:

10 7 * * * /usr/local/bin/node /path/real-estate-listings/src/main.js --diff-check >> /path/real-estate-listings/logs/stdout.log 2>&1

TODO list

• Standardize (create a schema) the output of listing and listings browsers
• Better handling of new export versions to avoid loosing notifications
• Allow ignoring some ids from the listings search