Automated Apartment Scraper
This idea came from looking to change units in my current building. Currently, there is no way to get notified when a unit you would like to look at becomes available. My idea was to build a webscraper that would scrape the available units from my building's website, then notify me once a unit became availalbe.
The first was to set up the webscraper, then once the scraper was in place, set up a way to alert me. In this case, I used AWS's SNS which would send an SMS text message when a unit became available.
Building a Webscraper
My first step to building a webscraper wass to find the page I wanted to scrape. In my case it the listing of all available apartments. Currrently there are only two bedroom apartments available, so I will want to add these units to the do not want list.
As you can see from above, the unit number is shown above "#813" We will want to pull that in order to see if it is in our list of apartments we aren't interested in.