SpareRoom Scraper

🏠 SpareRoom Scraper

Scrape SpareRoom UK (spareroom.co.uk) and SpareRoom US (spareroom.com): rooms for rent, rooms wanted and buddy-up ads, from a place name or any SpareRoom URL. Every ad comes back with rent, deposit, bills, all rooms, amenities, current flatmates, advertiser, photos, coordinates and the full description. No login, no browser, about 20 ads in under 15 seconds, and $0.70 per 1,000 listings.

✨ Why use SpareRoom Scraper?

• 🌍 UK and US in one actor: type London, SW1, Manchester, Brooklyn, Austin, TX or 90210, or paste URLs from either site. The right site is picked for each place.
• 🧾 The full ad, not just the card: every room with its own price, deposit and size, bills, minimum term, amenities, who lives there, who they want, advertiser type and response rate, latitude and longitude, photos in five sizes.
• 🔎 The site's own filters: rent range, room type, bills included, couples, posted by, furnishing, availability date, minimum term, keyword, radius and sort order.
• 📈 More than 1,000 ads per search: SpareRoom shows at most 1,000 ads per search. When you ask for more, the scraper splits the search into rent bands and removes duplicates, so a London search can return all of its 12,000+ rooms.
• 🔔 Monitoring mode: schedule a run and get only the ads that are new since the last run.
• ⚡ Fast and cheap: plain HTTP on datacenter proxies, 24 ads fetched in parallel, no start fee.

🎯 Use cases

• 🏘️ Rental market research: room rents by area, postcode, property type and bills, across UK and US cities.
• 💷 Price monitoring: track asking rents and new ads in the neighbourhoods you care about, every day.
• 🧑‍💼 Lead generation for letting agents and landlords: find live-out landlords and agents active in an area, or tenants with a budget looking for a room (rooms wanted).
• 🏗️ Investment and HMO analysis: rooms per property, rent per room, deposits and occupancy by area.
• 🎓 Academic and housing research: who is looking for what, where and at which budget.
• 🔔 Alerts: combine monitoring mode with a schedule and a webhook to be told about new rooms that match your filters.

🚀 How to use

1. Add one or more Locations (for example London, SW1, Leeds, Brooklyn, Austin, TX), or paste SpareRoom URLs of search results or single ads.
2. Pick the Listing type: rooms for rent, rooms wanted or buddy ups.
3. Set Maximum listings per input (20 by default, 0 for everything).
4. Optionally set Filters such as rent range, room type or bills included.
5. Click Start and export the results as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or read them through the API.

📥 Input

{
  "locations": ["London", "Brooklyn"],
  "startUrls": ["https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/london/"],
  "listingType": "offered",
  "maxItems": 100,
  "minRent": 700,
  "maxRent": 1200,
  "billsIncluded": true
}

📤 Output

One row per ad. Rows keep SpareRoom's own field names, so every field the site has for an ad is there. The main ones:

Example (trimmed, advertiser and text changed):

{
  "advert_id": "16814541",
  "listingType": "offered",
  "url": "https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/flatshare_detail.pl?flatshare_id=16814541",
  "site": "UK",
  "currency": "GBP",
  "ad_title": "Double Room in Tooting w/ Direct Garden Access!",
  "ad_text": "Cosy double room with direct access to the garden, 10 minutes from Tooting station...",
  "price": "£1,000 pcm",
  "min_rent": "1000",
  "per": "pcm",
  "bills_inc": "Yes",
  "available_from": "2026-10-26",
  "neighbourhood_name": "Tooting",
  "postcode": "SW17",
  "latitude": "51.4221076",
  "longitude": "-0.1546456",
  "property_type": "House",
  "rooms_in_property": "5",
  "amenities": {"living_room": "shared", "furnishings": "furnished", "garden": "Y", "broadband": "Y"},
  "rooms": [{"room_price": "1000", "room_per": "pcm", "room_type": "double", "security_deposit": "1000.00", "room_status": "available"}],
  "advertiser_name": "Maple Lane Homes",
  "advertiser_type": "agent",
  "enquiry_response": {"response_rate": "100", "response_time_desc": "Within a day"},
  "photos": [{"caption": "The Room", "large_url": "https://photos2.spareroom.co.uk/images/flatshare/listings/large/91/29/91298000.jpg"}],
  "basicInfo": {"id": "16814541", "region": "UK", "brand": "featured", "type": "offered", "title": "Double Room in Tooting w/ Direct Garden Access!", "price": "£1,000 pcm"},
  "detailsIncluded": true,
  "searchInput": "London (UK, rooms for rent)",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-21T18:08:49Z"
}

💰 Pricing

$0.70 per 1,000 listings ($0.0007 per saved listing), pay per result, with no start fee. Platform usage (compute and datacenter proxy) is billed on top and is small: about 12 KB of proxy traffic per listing, so 1,000 listings ≈ $0.72 in total. You only pay for listings that are saved; ads that were taken down while the run was going are not charged. Set a maximum total charge on the run and it stops cleanly when the limit is reached.

❓ FAQ

Is it legal to scrape SpareRoom? The actor only reads public ads that anyone can see without an account. Ads can contain personal data (names, photos); make sure your use complies with GDPR and similar laws in your country.

Do I need a SpareRoom account or a proxy? No login is needed. The run uses Scrapely datacenter proxies by default; if SpareRoom refuses them, it switches to residential proxies in the site's country by itself.

How many results can I get? SpareRoom shows at most 1,000 ads per search. If you ask for more (or set 0), the scraper splits the search into rent bands and reads each one, so you get close to every ad in the area. Pasted search URLs work the same way.

Why is a field empty? SpareRoom only returns what the advertiser filled in. Room-specific fields like nearest_station, max_term or interests are often missing, and rooms-wanted ads have budgets instead of rents.

Can I get only new ads? Turn on monitoring mode and schedule the run. Each run saves only ads that earlier runs with the same inputs have not saved.

Can I use it through the API or on a schedule? Yes: run it from the API, the CLI or a schedule, and send the results to webhooks or integrations.

⚠️ Limits

• Phone numbers and email addresses are not collected: SpareRoom shows them only to logged-in members.
• The radius filter changes UK searches only; US searches already cover the city.
• Ads taken down between the search page and the ad page are skipped.
• A single rent value with more than 1,000 ads in one search (very rare) is capped at 1,000 by the site; the run says so in its status message.
• Buddy ups exist on SpareRoom UK only.