Under the surface: Could web scraping help improve real estate investment?

While a relatively stable investment, real estate has to be evaluated based on numerous external and internal factors. Some of them might have an immediately obvious impact on pricing, such as construction, or the most up-to-date renovation date. These are also relatively easy to find.

There are factors, however, that may have a significant impact on the value of a property but are either harder to calculate or difficult to acquire. Crime rates, for example, have a propensity to affect the desirability of properties by a large margin. Getting accurate data, however, can be challenging in many countries.

On the other hand, data such as the density of nearby businesses might be easier to collect. Yet it is not always clear how these factors might affect property valuations. It is obvious that it somehow matters, but it is not exactly clear as to how much.

Web scraping can attenuate these issues by some margin. Automated data collection online can deliver fairly ac