property24.com

extract-listings-by-neighborhood

Installation

Adds this website's skill for your agents

 

Summary

Extract every for-sale or to-rent property listing in a South African suburb on property24.com — listing ID, price, bedrooms/bathrooms/parking, floor size, location, image, agent, and (optionally per-listing) full address, lat/lon, erf size, rates, levies, and amenity flags.

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SKILL.md
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Property24 Extract Listings by Neighborhood

Purpose

Given a Property24 neighborhood (suburb) URL or a {slug, city, province, suburbId} quadruple, return every property listing in that neighborhood with structured fields: listing ID, canonical URL, listing type (house / apartment / townhouse / etc.), price (ZAR), bedrooms, bathrooms, parking, floor size, location, listing image, listing date, agent / agency, and (when the per-listing detail page is fetched) full address, lat/lon, erf size, rates & taxes, levies, and amenity flags. Read-only — never submits search alerts, never contacts an agent, never books a viewing.

When to Use

  • Bulk extraction of every for-sale or to-rent listing in a suburb (e.g. "all houses for sale in Rivonia, Sandton").
  • Periodic monitoring of new listings posted in a watched suburb.
  • Downstream analytics: price-per-square-metre, median asking price by suburb, agent/agency market-share, days-on-market.
  • Building a dataset of South African residential property by region — Property24 indexes ~20,750 suburbs nationwide.

Workflow

Property24 is server-rendered HTML with no anti-bot wall on listing pages. The fastest, cheapest, most reliable extraction path is browse cloud fetch (or any plain HTTPS GET) against the canonical suburb URL — no JS execution, no headed browser, no captcha. Both --proxies and bare requests returned 200 OK in testing; residential proxies are not required. Use the fetch path; the browser is a fallback only.

1. Resolve the suburb URL

Property24 URLs follow a stable pattern:

https://www.property24.com/{searchType}/{suburb-slug}/{city-slug}/{province-slug}/{suburbId}
                                                                                      └── numeric, canonical

Where:

  • searchType ∈ for-sale | to-rent
  • {suburb-slug}/{city-slug}/{province-slug} is human-readable (rivonia/sandton/gauteng, sea-point/cape-town/western-cape)
  • {suburbId} is a numeric ID — this is the canonical key. The site 301-redirects any URL with the wrong slug to the correct one as long as the numeric ID is right. Example: /for-sale/anything/anywhere/anywhere/4251 → 301 → /for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251.

To discover the ID + slug for an arbitrary suburb name, GET https://www.property24.com/sitemap/Suburbs?SearchType=ForSale — a single XML file (~3.5 MB) listing all ~20,750 suburb URLs. Grep for the suburb name. Cache locally; the sitemap updates daily but suburb IDs are stable across years.

For a province-wide or city-wide search, use the lower-level URL: /for-sale/{province-slug}/1 (province), /for-sale/{city-slug}/{province-slug}/{cityId} (city). The same parsing logic applies.

2. Fetch the listing-index page

browse cloud fetch "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251" --proxies
# Or without proxies — both return 200:
browse cloud fetch "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251"

Page size is ~220–260 KB of HTML. Each page contains up to ~22 listing tiles (mix of p24_regularTile and p24_proTile / boosted variants).

3. Parse listing tiles from the index page

Tiles are anchored on <div class="...p24_tileContainer..." data-listing-number="{id}">. Within each tile:

FieldExtractor (regex on the tile chunk)
listing_iddata-listing-number="(\d+)"
url<a href="(/(?:for-sale|to-rent)/[^"]+)" — prepend https://www.property24.com, strip the ?plId=…&plt=…&plsIds=… tracking params
title<meta itemprop="name" content="([^"]+)" (e.g. "5 Bedroom House", "Commercial Property")
price<div class="p24_price">\s*([^<]+) — string "R 1 421 900". Strip non-digits to get ZAR integer. Free-text variants: "POA" (price on application), "Price on Request"
description<div class="p24_description">([\s\S]*?)</div> — strip inner tags; e.g. "2 Bedroom Apartment in Rivonia"
location_label<span class="p24_location">([^<]+)</span> (the suburb tag inside the description)
bedroomstitle="Bedrooms"[\s\S]*?<span>(\d+)</span>
bathroomstitle="Bathrooms"[\s\S]*?<span>(\d+)</span>
parkingtitle="Parking Spaces"[\s\S]*?<span>(\d+)</span>
floor_sizetitle="Floor Size"[\s\S]*?<span>([^<]+)</span> — "69 m²" (HTML-encoded as &#xB2;)
image<img[^>]+src="(https://images\.prop24\.com/[^"]+)" — append /Crop600x400 size suffix variants

To split a page into per-tile chunks: locate all match positions of the regex <div class="[^"]*p24_tileContainer[^"]*"[^>]*data-listing-number="\d+" and slice between consecutive matches. Tiles without listing prices use boosted/sponsored layouts — extract title + ID and skip price.

4. Paginate

The page footer contains the pagination block:

<a href="https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251/p2" data-pagenumber="2">2</a>

The maximum page number is the largest integer in data-pagenumber="(\d+)". Construct subsequent URLs by appending /p2, /p3, etc. to the suburb base URL — do not add a query string. Page 1 has no /p1 suffix (use the bare suburb URL).

# Rivonia has 12 pages × ~22 listings ≈ ~260 total
for p in $(seq 1 12); do
  url="https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251"
  [ "$p" -gt 1 ] && url="$url/p$p"
  browse cloud fetch "$url"
  sleep 1   # be gentle — 1 req/sec is safe
done

Property24 does not publish an explicit total-results count in the HTML; derive ~total = (max_page × per_page) where per_page ≈ 22 for the first 11 pages and the last page may be partial.

5. (Optional) Fetch per-listing detail pages for richer data

Each listing URL (/{searchType}/{...}/{listing-id}) returns a detail page with a single <script type="application/ld+json"> block containing schema.org RealEstateListing JSON. The script tag has its + HTML-encoded — match application/ld&#x2B;json, not application/ld+json:

const re = /<script type="application\/ld&#x2B;json">([\s\S]*?)<\/script>/g;

The JSON-LD provides:

  • datePosted (ISO date)
  • about.@type — Apartment / House / Townhouse / etc.
  • about.numberOfBedrooms, about.numberOfBathroomsTotal
  • about.floorSize.value + unitCode (MTK = m²)
  • about.address — streetAddress, addressLocality, addressRegion, addressCountry
  • about.latitude, about.longitude
  • about.petsAllowed
  • offers.priceSpecification.price + priceCurrency (ZAR)
  • offers.offeredBy.name + worksFor.name + worksFor.url (agent + agency)
  • description, image, name, url
  • breadcrumb.itemListElement — full Province → City → Suburb → Listing path with each level's canonical URL

The detail page also has a Property Overview section accessible via regex:

/<div class="col-6 p24_propertyOverviewKey">([^<]+)<\/div>\s*<div class="col-6 p24_propertyOverviewResult">\s*<div class="p24_info">([^<]+)<\/div>/g

Yielding key/value pairs: Listing Number, Type of Property, Listing Date, Erf Size, Floor Size, Price per m², Levies, No Transfer Duty, Rates and Taxes, Pets Allowed, Bedrooms, Bathrooms, Kitchens, Reception Rooms, Parking, Pool, Security, Special Feature, Internet Access, etc. Order and presence vary by listing.

Detail-page fetches are optional — they roughly double extraction cost (1 fetch per listing instead of 1 per index page) but give substantially more depth. Decide based on the caller's needs.

Browser fallback (only if HTTP fetch ever gets blocked)

If browse cloud fetch starts returning 403 / WAF challenges (not observed in current testing, but document the path):

SID=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive --verified --proxies | node -e "let s='';process.stdin.on('data',c=>s+=c).on('end',()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s).id))")
export BROWSE_SESSION="$SID"
browse open "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251" --remote
browse wait load --remote
browse wait timeout 2000 --remote
HTML=$(browse get html body --remote)
# Apply the same regexes from step 3 to $HTML.
browse cloud sessions update "$SID" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

browse snapshot is not useful for listing extraction here — the listing grid is rendered into nested <div> containers without semantic roles, so the accessibility tree is sparse. Use browse get html body and regex/HTML parse it.

Site-Specific Gotchas

  • No anti-bot on listing pages. Tested with and without --proxies; both returned HTTP 200. --verified (stealth) is not required. The robots.txt explicitly allows /for-sale/, /to-rent/, and all suburb / city / province listing pages. Don't waste credits on --verified --proxies unless a 4xx forces you to.
  • Numeric suburbId is canonical; slug is decorative. Any URL with the right numeric ID at the end and a wrong slug (/for-sale/anything/anywhere/anywhere/4251) 301-redirects to the canonical slug. This is robust if you have ID-only references (e.g. from a DB) and don't want to maintain a slug mapping.
  • Pagination uses /pN path suffix, not query string. ?page=2 is silently ignored — the page returns page-1 results. Always construct /{suburb-url}/p2, /p3, etc. Page 1 has no suffix.
  • No total-results count is exposed. The listing HTML never says "264 properties for sale". Derive it from max(data-pagenumber) × per-page (~22). If the caller requires an exact count, fetch the last page and count its tiles, then (max_page - 1) × 22 + last_page_tile_count.
  • <meta itemprop="name"> is not unique per tile. Some tiles contain a second <meta itemprop="name"> for the listing agency inside an Organization itemscope. Anchor extraction on the FIRST <meta itemprop="name"> after the tile start, not the last.
  • Two listing-tile layouts coexist on the same page: p24_regularTile (image-on-left, info-on-right) and boosted variants (p24_proTile, p24_boostedTile). All carry data-listing-number, but boosted tiles sometimes omit the <div class="p24_price"> block (the price is rendered inside a different sub-tree). Tolerate missing price; never reject a tile because price is absent.
  • Price values are space-separated, not comma-separated: "R 1 421 900", not "R 1,421,900". Strip all non-digits to get the ZAR integer. Special non-numeric values: "POA" (Price On Application), "On Request". Treat as null numeric + preserve string.
  • Floor size unit is "m²" rendered as HTML entity &#xB2;. Decode entity → ² before storing. JSON-LD reports the same value as unitCode: "MTK" (UN/ECE Recommendation 20 — square metre).
  • {plId, plt, plsIds} tracking query params on tile URLs. Always strip — the canonical detail URL is everything before ?. Two URLs differing only in tracking params are the same listing.
  • JSON-LD <script> tag uses application/ld&#x2B;json (HTML-encoded +). A naïve regex looking for application/ld+json (literal +) finds zero blocks. Match ld&#x2B;json or use an HTML parser that unescapes attribute values.
  • /Autocomplete, /api/autocomplete, /results/GroupedListings, and /mapSearch/* endpoints are 404 or disallowed by robots.txt. Don't waste time on internal JSON APIs — the public site delivers full data via plain HTML. The sitemap is the supported discovery mechanism.
  • www.craigslist-style geo-redirect on bare domain. https://www.property24.com/ returns the global homepage (no IP geolocation rewrite). Direct URLs to province / city / suburb pages always honour the slug+ID.
  • Sitemap is the authoritative suburb-name → URL index. /sitemap/Suburbs?SearchType=ForSale lists every suburb URL for sale; the ToRent variant lists rentals. Many suburbs appear in both. For finer enumeration there are also per-category variants (?PropertyCategory=House&SearchType=ForSale etc.) which let you scope the master list to a single property type — useful when you only care about, say, houses vs. apartments.
  • Rate limit posture is informal. Property24 does not return Retry-After or 429 in fetched traffic; sustained > 5 req/s eventually trips an HTTP 503. Stay ≤ 1 req/s and you're safe across multi-thousand listing crawls.
  • Sandton ≠ Sandton city. "Sandton" the city has its own URL (/for-sale/sandton/gauteng/109), distinct from suburbs within Sandton like Rivonia (/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251). The numeric IDs are independent — 109 is the city, 4251 is the suburb. When the caller says "Sandton", clarify which level they mean (or default to the city-level URL and offer to drill into individual suburbs from the breadcrumb).
  • addressLocality in JSON-LD = suburb name, not city. South-African convention: a Rivonia listing has addressLocality: "Rivonia", addressRegion: "Gauteng" — Sandton (the parent city) is captured only in the breadcrumb.itemListElement chain, not in the postal address.

Expected Output

Two output shapes — pick based on whether the caller requested detail-page enrichment.

Shape A — Index-only (fast path, 1 fetch per ~22 listings)

{
  "suburb": {
    "id": 4251,
    "slug": "rivonia",
    "city": "sandton",
    "province": "gauteng",
    "url": "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251",
    "search_type": "for-sale"
  },
  "pagination": {
    "pages_fetched": 12,
    "max_page": 12,
    "approx_total_listings": 264
  },
  "listings": [
    {
      "listing_id": "116346248",
      "url": "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251/116346248",
      "title": "2 Bedroom Apartment",
      "price_text": "R 1 421 900",
      "price_zar": 1421900,
      "price_currency": "ZAR",
      "description": "2 Bedroom Apartment in Rivonia",
      "location_label": "Rivonia",
      "bedrooms": 2,
      "bathrooms": 1,
      "parking": 2,
      "floor_size_m2": 69,
      "image": "https://images.prop24.com/365575101"
    }
  ]
}

Shape B — Index + detail enrichment (slow path, +1 fetch per listing)

{
  "suburb": { "id": 4251, "slug": "rivonia", "city": "sandton", "province": "gauteng", "search_type": "for-sale" },
  "listings": [
    {
      "listing_id": "116346248",
      "url": "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251/116346248",
      "title": "2 Bedroom Apartment / flat for sale in Rivonia",
      "price_zar": 1421900,
      "price_currency": "ZAR",
      "type_of_property": "Apartment",
      "bedrooms": 2,
      "bathrooms": 1,
      "kitchens": 1,
      "reception_rooms": 1,
      "parking": 2,
      "floor_size_m2": 69,
      "erf_size_m2": 69,
      "price_per_m2_zar": 20607,
      "levies_zar": 2024,
      "rates_and_taxes_zar": 1054,
      "no_transfer_duty": true,
      "pets_allowed": true,
      "pool": true,
      "security": ["24 Hour Access", "Guard House", "Guard"],
      "internet_access": "Fibre",
      "listing_date": "2025-08-21",
      "address": {
        "street": "125 The Atrium, 9 De La Rey Road",
        "suburb": "Rivonia",
        "city": "Sandton",
        "province": "Gauteng",
        "country": "South Africa"
      },
      "latitude": -26.059682,
      "longitude": 28.05854,
      "agency": {
        "name": "Renprop Residential",
        "url": "https://www.property24.com/estate-agents/renprop-residential/24355",
        "logo": "https://images.prop24.com/365574966/Fit450x225"
      },
      "agent": {
        "name": "Julia Mpofu",
        "url": "https://www.property24.com/estate-agents/renprop-residential/julia-mpofu/433322"
      },
      "image": "https://images.prop24.com/363468997",
      "description": "Modern 2 Bed 1 Bath Apartment - Investor Package Available",
      "breadcrumb": [
        { "name": "Property for Sale", "url": "https://www.property24.com/" },
        { "name": "Gauteng",            "url": "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/gauteng/1" },
        { "name": "Sandton",            "url": "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/sandton/gauteng/109" },
        { "name": "Rivonia",            "url": "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/rivonia/sandton/gauteng/4251" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Edge-case shapes

// Suburb URL resolves but has no current listings (small / rural suburb)
{ "suburb": {...}, "pagination": { "max_page": 1, "approx_total_listings": 0 }, "listings": [] }

// Caller passed an invalid suburbId — site 404s
{ "success": false, "reason": "suburb_not_found", "url_attempted": "https://www.property24.com/for-sale/xyz/abc/abc/999999" }

// Listing tile present but priced "On Application"
{ "listing_id": "...", "price_text": "POA", "price_zar": null, "price_currency": "ZAR", ... }