CRE Data Exporter: Commercial Real Estate Chrome Extension

The CRE Data Exporter Chrome Extension allows you to easily extract commercial real estate listings data and trends from websites like Crexi.com. The extension allows you to download the data into a nicely formatted CSV file or Google Sheet. Here are the core features:

After installing the Chrome Extension

You can find the extension in your browser by navigating to "chrome://extensions/" in the address bar of your browser.

To pin the extension for easy access, click on the puzzle icon at the top right, scroll down to the CRE Data Exporter Extension, and click the pin button.

Start scraping

To begin scraping data off of Crexi.com, navigate to the Crexi.com website and search for a location. This could be a city, zip code, or state. Once you see the location search results, click on the CRE Data Exporter extension icon at the top right:

The interface of the extension is extremely simple. There are only 3 buttons to all the functionality. You can "Get Data", "Clear Data", or "Export Data" to download the extracted data to a file. You can also set the settings by clicking the gear icon.

To get data for a specific location, just click the "Get Data" button and the extension will automatically do its thing.

The extension will work in the background to get the listings data from the location that you want. Don't close the tab when the automation task is working. When it's finished, you'll see something like this in the options.html page.

Download the extracted data

Once you've finished, to download the data just click the "Export Data" button. Save the CSV file onto your computer in a directory that you choose. Or you can choose to save it to a Google Sheets files.

Getting data for another location

To start get data for more results but for another location, perform a new search but inputting another location in the search bar. Once the search results have populated, open up the extension again, click "Clear Data", and then click "Get Data". This will start the automation process again.

If you don't need the data anymore, you can simply click "Clear Data" and the information saved in the extension will then be removed.

Disclaimer on Automation, Beta Features, and Scraping

Scraping features like extracting detailed data from a single property's listing page is meant to be used ethically even through scraping publicly available data from sites like Crexi.com is completely legal (see the hiQ Labs vs LinkedIn ruling).

For context, Crexi.com and similar websites disallows spamming of its servers with frequent and many page requests. This is usually the behavior of automated bots that access their pages to do something else. To minimize and protect against this, Crexi.com may block access to its servers from specific IP addresses if it detects any type of automated behavior.

In order to extract data, the CRE Data Exporter extension has to access various pages on the website and perform API calls with the browser. This causes it to request data from Crexi.com's servers. Doing this too often and too uniformly (like a bot) may lead Crexi.com to believe it is automated and may cause your IP address to be blocked.

As a result, you may lose access to the website. The mitigate this, the extension has built in variation in the time delay and waits a suitable amount of time before navigating to the next page. This should bypass Crexi.com's protections and allow you to use the website normally. However, there is no guarantee. Please use at your own risk.

If you want to minimize this risk, you can use a VPN like NordVPN where rotating IP addresses manually can help.

Are you a real estate investor? Try out our Google Sheets add-on that helps you analyze long and short term rentals and fix and flips.

Please see CRE Data Exporter's privacy policy and terms.