I have a client that wants a task that is near to impossible if not impossible. He wants to be able to find people who haven’t found a realtor yet, and send them a email saying he can help them with their search. So I believe he wants me to scrape zillow or rent.com to find people looking for houses. or some other website to find people in rental properties that may want to buy in the coming years. Is this possible if so how do i do it?
There are web scapers that integrate with Make.
Do you know how you would do it manually? Remember that Make is an automation engine. The assumes that you know what to do and you will tell Make how to do it.
So you really need to go step by step and then give those instructions to Make. If all you’re doing is using a browser and some online tools to do this manually, there’s a good chance that you would be able to automate it with Make.
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Assuming the website is giving you access over it’s data (which is unlikely?), yes it’s possible. Ask for their APIs. Keep in mind that you can probably ask APIs to scrape data that is viewed by users (all the rental properties that are listed and some contact metadata etc.), but the traffic data will be highly restricted and/or expensive.
There is another problem. For maybe the first time in a while (especially with a system this complex) I am not sure where to even start.
Start by doing it manually. Take notes on how you are doing it and the types of results you get. Then you try to automate. You can’t automate something you don’t know how to do to begin with.
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First, ask how they normally do it manually “by hand”.
Then, try to automate that.
If a service doesn’t exist, see if they can switch to a suitable alternative.