The Impact Of Web Scraping On Real Estate Listing Websites

Real-estate listing portals are one of the most vulnerable websites to web scraping because of their business model. Property data listings and real estate photos are highly valuable and relatively easy to steal using malicious web scraping bots. With InfiSecure’s experience of protecting real estate listing websites from bot frauds, we have seen bots traffic reaching close of 70% of entire web traffic. We saw a bad bot traffic of up to 42% on real estate listing websites. These are mostly web scraping bots. For this reason, an effective bot protection platform is crucial for any online real estate website with an inventory of listing data.

How Online Bots Impact Real Estate Listing Websites?

Web scrapers are scraping your real estate website because they are making money with your listings. In return you are just left with higher costs and lost revenues. Here is how web scraping impacts real estate listing portals:

1. Web Scraping from listing portals takes away your business
2. Real estate listing is gathered tediously from multiple sources and has a cost to it. When web scraping bots steal your listing data, they’re essentially stealing the value of your investment in collecting and compiling such data, and this affects your revenue and margins. When bad bots steal your data, your website loses traffic while your competitor’s portal gains.


2. Degraded SEO of your real estate listing portal
3. Uniqueness of real-estate listings is critical to a real-estate portal’s business. When scraping bots steal listing from your portal, your data is no more exclusive and unique. Now your competitors will attract website traffic and leads. This will degrade your SEO as your content is replicated across the web. Also, the scraping bots many-a-times get accounted in the GA and increase your bounce rate metrics and hurt your time spent on website metrics. These affects further reduce your platform’s search engine rankings.


3. High web infrastructure cost
4. When bad bots commit fraudlent activities on your real estate portal, they typically consume between 15%-40% of server capacity and bandwidth. This results in high server cost, more server requirements and higher load on current server infrastructure. This can easily be avoided by an effective bot detection solution in place.


4. The effect of form spam and fake listings
5. Malicious bots can fill in fraudulent registration forms and generate fake listings on your real-estate portal. The number of fake listings on some portals have gone as high as 80% of all listings on the portals. Spam leads will waste your sales efforts by focussing on leads that can never be contacted. This also results in a very negative user experience for genuine buyers, brokers and real-estate agents.

An effective bot protection solution can help real estate websites with improving key KPIs:

• Protect all listings in real-time
• Decrease hosting and bandwidth costs
• Prevent fraudulent lead forms and spam
• Increase website speed
• Avoid personal litigation costs

While a few real estate portals try to put in-house bot detection solutions in place to protect website from online bots, such traditional bot detection techniques are not much effective in terms of accuracy, are high cost intensive and use up engineering resources quickly. Blocking IPs and using rate limits to protect listing data is obsolete when a high percentage of bot traffic originates from IP addresses that belong to consumer ISPs and keep on randomly changing. A robust bot protection platform such as InfiSecure can protect real estate websites from all bad bots without impacting consumers or relying on blocking IP addresses.