Pro Property Insights: Real Estate Analyzer Chrome Extension

The Pro Property Insights Chrome Extension allows you to easily scrape extract real estate data and trends from websites like Zillow. 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 Pro Property Insights Extension, and click the pin button.

Start scraping

To begin scraping data off of Zillow, navigate to the Zillow website and search for a location. This could be a city, zip code, or you can use the map draw feature to manually specify a region on the map. Once you see the location search results (the page looks like this), click on the Pro Property Insights 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 "Download" the data. You can also set the settings by clicking the gear icon.

To analyze and get data for a specific location, just click the "Get Data" button and the extension will automatically do its thing. During this process, make sure the extension popup is kept open. Otherwise, the automation will not happen correctly. Please see this post if the popup unexpectedly closes for a solution.

The extension will navigate to all the necessary pages to extract information and then compile it into the extension where is saved. You will see the information of the scraped data in the popup like this:

Download the scraped data

Once you've finished, to download the data just click the "Download" 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.

The data is labeled accordingly in the headers and you can also choose which data to export to your downloaded files if there is too much data by clicking on the settings icon and then clicking "Customize data to export".

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 and click "Get Data". This will start the automation process again and then will add this location's data to the saved and compiled information in the extension.

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 Zillow is completely legal (see the hiQ Labs vs LinkedIn ruling).

For context, Zillow 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, Zillow may block access to its servers from specific IP addresses if it detects any type of automated behavior.

In order to extract data, the Pro Property Insights extension has to access various pages on the website. This causes it to request data from Zillow's servers. Doing this too often and too uniformly (like a bot) may lead Zillow 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 Zillow'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 Pro Property Insights' privacy policy and terms.