If you ever spent hours hunting for housing ads, browsing internet and clicking on hundreds of links, you will probably know how useless and boring such activity might be. I have done it once, and never wanted to repeat it again, so I wrote myself this small, but extremely useful program to work for me and help find accomodation in Geneva. This robot will watch websites, extract data, and hopefully save you time and money! (unless, of course, many people start using it and similar-- no advantage then ;-)).

The basic principle is fairly simple: once you start it, the robot will download various websites, extract data from the, follow links (if necessary), exctract more data, then save everything into a database and serve this all via interactive interface. You pick the most interesting ads and call the landlord before other people find the same.

The bot knows how to process these sites:

announcesjaunes.fr
immofranceain.fr
immostreet.ch
homegate.ch
worldradio.ch
toutimmobilier.ch
landecy.fr
paruvendu.fr
petitesannonces.ch
ghi.ch
glocals.ch

The software is released as open-source undel GPL license, for your convenience, I have packaged the program into an executable Windows binary. Linux and Mac users can use the source code, you will need Python (at least 2.5) and several other packages installed on your machine (sqlalchemy, simplejson).

On Windows, you can run this command to update the database:

update_database.bat

During the update, the program will start downloading/extracting housing ads, you will see something similar:

After the update is finished, you can view the results inside any web browser. Windows users should run the supplied bat file:

show_results.bat

The table that you can see below is interactive, you can sort ads, filter them, tag them, add your own comments. After each update, you will see the new ads (I used to run the program in 4 hour intervals, just checking for new housing ads).

For tech savy people: everything is written in Python, therefore the program is portable. It is possible to add new filters/scrappers. The configuration file instructs the program which sites to download, which filter to apply on them, and what ads are considered as a good match (please have a look inside the README.txt, finder.cfg and the source code).