The Bargain-Finder-inator 5000: One programmer's quest for a new flat

 The Bargain-Finder-inator 5000: One programmer's quest for a new flat

Or how I managed to get a reasonably priced apartment offer despite estate agencies

I think every one of us had to go through the hell that's searching for a new place to live. The reasons may be of all kinds, starting with moving between jobs or random life events, ending with your landlord wanting to raise your rent for fixing his couch despite your 3 years of begging for him to do so. You can guess my reasoning from that totally not suspiciously specific example, one thing's for certain - many of us, not lucky enough to be on their own yet, have to go through that not very delightful experience.

One major problem when scraping those online market websites, is that you're not the only one desperately doing so. And if it was only for the fellow lost souls who are trying to make ends meet, oh no - many real estate agencies say hello there as well. So when a very good offer finally comes up, one that you've been dreaming your whole life kind of one, you grab that phone and call them not maybe, but may they please-oh-lord pick up. Despite you wasting no breath, chances are that when you enthusiastically call them (after correcting the typos in the phone number you made out of excitement), you're already too late. Even though you ended up manually checking the damn website every 20 minutes (yup, I set an alarm), and you called after only a quarter, you were still not fast enough and there are already four people in line before you. Which in case of a good offer means it's as good as doughnuts at work you heard they were giving out to buy your sympathy for the corporate - gone even faster than they have probably arrived. Yup, that's basically the housing market situation in Poland, yay \o/

But do not abandon all hope ye who enter here -  after having only a couple of mental break downs my friend sent me a link to a program on github, that was supposed to scrap our local market website and give instance notice about new offers. The web page did have a similar function, but it only worked in theory - the emails about the "latest" offers came only once a day, not to mention the fact that they were from the day before. Oh well, in that case saying goodbye to the 20 minute alarm sounded like a dream come true, so I tried to configure the program olx-scraper to my needs. However, it turned out to be pretty useless as well - it would repeatedly fetch a whole list of offers from only one page of search results, and compare its size between iterations. If the length of such list increased, it would theoretically mean that there are new offers, and the program would send a mail notification that contained the whole list. While this approach kinda worked for searches that returns only a few results, the whole idea fell apart when there were more than could fit in one page. In that case the number of offers would seem to remain constant, and new offers would be missed. Another room for improvement was in lack of ability to ignore certain kinds of offers, such as ads, and not so helpful emails, which could just give you what you're looking for - the newest offer, instead of the whole list.

Here comes the sun in the form of the Bargain-Finder-inator 5000 to the rescue! I quickly realized that a few patches was not enough to fix the old program for my (or frankly saying anyone's) use case and re-wrote the whole searching algorithm, eventually leading to a whole new program. The original name was "Wyszukiwator-Mieszkań 5000", inspired by Dr. Doofenschmirtz various schemes and inventions, and roughly translates to "Searcher-Of-Flats 5000". However, as the project grew beyond the real estate market, I needed a new name that would reflect that - it also needed to be slightly more accessible for foreigners than our oh how beautiful polish words. So I came up with the current one, with the best fitting abbreviation: bf5000. I think it's kind of neat :)

Totally accurate photograph of me giving birth to Bargain-Finder-inator 5000 circa 2024, colorized

What Bargain-Finder-inator 5000 dutifully does is monitor a link you serve to it, pointing to an online marketplace, be it for a real estate market or any other you can think of. The catch is that it needs to be supported, but writing a new backend shouldn't be too much of a hassle, and when it is you can simply copy paste the URL of your search with all the necessary filters specified, and  give it to bf5000. You also need to specify the delay between each check for new offers, which consists of fetching only the latest offer, and comparing it with the previous "latest". If they don't match, then we are in for some goodies - an email notification with the link to the latest offer will be sent, so you need to specify the email title, addresses and the whole provider too. For more information, check out the repository on gitlab.

So, don't wait no more for better days, and be part of the change now! We can take back what's rightfully ours from those money-hungry real estate agencies! When I say Bargain, you say Finder-inator 5000! You get the idea.


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