PropTech Startup Builds
Valuation Engine on
4M Live Listings

The Problem

The client was building an automated valuation model (AVM) for the UK residential property market. Their model needed structured data from every active listing on Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket — including price, location, property attributes, listing age, and price reduction history.

They had attempted to build an in-house scraping solution but hit a wall within weeks. Rightmove's bot detection blocked their scrapers within hours of deployment. Their engineering team was spending more time fighting anti-scraping measures than building the actual product.

• In-house scrapers blocked by Rightmove within hours of deployment
• No consistent data pipeline — engineers manually downloading data weekly
• Missing price reduction history, a critical AVM signal
• Incomplete postcode coverage across rural and outer-London areas
• Engineering team distracted from core product development for 3 months

What DataGators Built

DataGators scoped and built a daily pipeline covering all 4 million active listings across Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket. The pipeline captured 34 structured data fields per listing and tracked price change history with full timestamps — a key requirement for the AVM team.

• Full-coverage scrapers for Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket
• 34 structured fields per listing: price, beds, baths, EPC, tenure, agent, postcode sector, listing date, and more
• Price reduction history tracked with timestamps for every listing
• New listing and de-listed property detection for market velocity signals
• Daily delivery to AWS S3 in structured Parquet format, ready for model ingestion
• 90-day historical backfill delivered at project start for model training

The Results

The pipeline delivered its first full dataset 19 days after the discovery call. The client's AVM went into beta 6 weeks later — a product milestone they had been unable to reach for the previous 5 months due to the data problem.

Technology Stack

Property portals like Rightmove are among the most heavily protected sites in the UK. DataGators' proprietary infrastructure uses residential UK proxies, browser fingerprint rotation, and adaptive crawl scheduling to maintain consistent coverage without triggering detection systems.

• Residential UK proxy network with postcode-level targeting
• Browser fingerprint rotation with realistic session behaviour
• Adaptive crawl scheduling based on listing update frequency patterns
• Parquet and CSV output delivered to AWS S3 daily with schema versioning
• Price change event stream available via webhook for real-time AVM updates
• Full data lineage tracking — every record includes source URL, scrape timestamp, and field confidence score