Pricing

Rating

Developer

Actor stats

Categories

Share

👁 ParseForge Banner

🛏️ SpareRoom UK Scraper

🚀 Export SpareRoom UK roommate and rental listings in seconds. Weekly rent, deposit, postcode, room type, household details, and listing URL in one structured dataset.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-05 · 📊 14 fields per listing · UK-wide coverage · Rooms, studios, 1-bed flats · Live SpareRoom search results

The SpareRoom UK Scraper turns any spareroom.co.uk flatshare search into a clean dataset. Give it a town, city, or postcode, pick a room type, optionally clamp weekly rent, and the actor walks every search-result page and flattens each listing into one row.

📋 What the SpareRoom UK Scraper does

• Builds the SpareRoom flatshare search URL from your location, room type, and rent bounds.
• Walks every result page until your maxItems cap or the end of results.
• Parses each listing card for title, weekly rent, location, room type, and listing URL.
• Detects the postcode from the location text when present.
• Surfaces upstream errors as a clean record rather than crashing.
• Emits records ready for download in tabular and structured formats.

💡 Why it matters: SpareRoom is the dominant UK roommate marketplace, but its data is locked behind a paginated HTML search. This actor flattens the catalog into one tidy dataset.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon.

⚙️ Input

Example 1, London double rooms under £300pw:

{"searchLocation":"London","roomType":"double","maxRent":300,"maxItems":100}

Example 2, Manchester en-suite rooms:

{"searchLocation":"Manchester","roomType":"ensuite","maxItems":50}

⚠️ Good to Know: SpareRoom returns the strongest matches first. If a search returns fewer pages than you expect, broaden the area or relax the rent filter.

📊 Output

Sample record:

{
"title":"Double room in Camden",
"weekly_rent":240,
"deposit":null,
"location":"Camden Town, NW1",
"postcode":"NW1",
"room_type":"Double room",
"available_from":"Now",
"min_term":null,
"household_size":null,
"gender_pref":null,
"smoker_pref":null,
"url":"https://www.spareroom.co.uk/flatshare/flatshare_detail.pl?flatshare_id=12345678",
"scrapedAt":"2026-06-05T13:00:00.000Z",
"error":null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

| 🇬🇧 | UK-wide coverage, any town or postcode. | | 🧹 | Clean numeric rent column ready for analysis. | | 🛟 | Returns a clean error record on upstream blocks rather than crashing. | | 🔢 | Postcode auto-detected from the location string. | | 🏘️ | Filter by room type and rent bounds. | | 💾 | Push to dataset, then download in tabular or structured formats. |

📈 How it compares to alternatives

🚀 How to use

1. Click Try for free.
2. Type a city, town, or postcode.
3. Optionally pick a room type and rent bounds.
4. Click Start. The dataset is ready in seconds.

💼 Business use cases

🏘️ Letting agent intel. Track competitor inventory in your operating area daily.

📊 Market reports. Build rent-by-postcode datasets for client briefings.

📰 Newsroom analytics. Quantify how the rental squeeze shifts week to week.

🤖 ML training. Train rent-prediction models on real listing data.

🔌 Automating SpareRoom UK Scraper

• Make and Zapier, push new listings to Slack, Airtable, or Google Sheets.
• Cron schedule, native Apify scheduler runs the search every morning.
• Webhooks, get a POST when the run finishes.
• Pipe to BigQuery, Snowflake, or Postgres, native Apify integrations move datasets straight into your warehouse.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

🎓 Education. Use real housing-market data in coursework.

🧪 Personal research. Compare neighborhoods before moving.

🤝 Non-profit. Map affordability gaps across UK cities.

🧰 Tinkering. Prototype a rental aggregator without writing a scraper.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Drop this README into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant and ask it to map your specific workflow to the actor's inputs.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Is this scraping or API? HTML scraping of the public SpareRoom search.

❓ How fresh is the data? As fresh as SpareRoom serves it. The actor runs the live search.

❓ Are rents normalised? Yes, rent is parsed as a number in GBP, weekly basis.

❓ Can I search by postcode? Yes, full or partial UK postcode works.

❓ Does it follow individual listing pages? Not by default. Card-level fields only for speed.

❓ How are errors handled? Upstream errors become a clean record with error populated.

❓ Will the schema change? Card-level fields are stable. New fields are added as the site exposes them.

❓ Can I schedule runs? Yes, use Apify's native scheduler or Make and Zapier.

❓ What download formats are supported? All formats Apify dataset export supports.

❓ Is residential proxying used? Yes, UK residential proxies are used by default for clean access.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Apify ships native integrations with Make, Zapier, Slack, Discord, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Gmail, Airbyte, Keboola, Telegram, GitHub, and any REST API or webhook endpoint.

🔗 Recommended Actors

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for 900+ production-grade scrapers across business intelligence, real estate, e-commerce, sports, finance, and public records.

Disclaimer: This actor scrapes only publicly available data. ParseForge is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of the third-party services referenced. Users are responsible for complying with the target site's terms of service and applicable law. Create a free account w/ $5 credit.