Property24 is South Africa's most widely used web portal for property, both among prospective buyers and renters. At any given time, the site contains more than 300,000 listings ranging from residential, over commercial and industrial all the way to agricultural property. As such it harbours a considerable wealth of data. This data can be extracted for analysis through a process known as web scraping. A web scraper is a script that scans the HTML structure of a website and looks for certain keywords, recording its results.
At the time, this was by far the most technically involved project I had ever attempted and it was therefore somewhat daunting, but I was highly motivated and with lots of patience and even more help from ChatGPT, I eventually got it done.
Final Data Output
The tool ultimately outputs an excel file containing all the listings with their respective price, property type, location, number of bedrooms and number of bathrooms. This can then be cleaned, transformed and analysed.
If you'd like to enquire about using the script for your own use-cases, feel free to contact me.