Get-ApartmentListings

Aggregates search results from:

• apartmentfinder.com
• apartmentsearch.com
• forrent.com
• hotpads.com
• mynewplace.com
• padmapper.com
• rentcafe.com
• trulia.com
• walkscore.com
• zillow.com
• and zumper.com

This script uses excel2table to create the final table of results.

Usage

This script will only work using Windows PowerShell and will not work with PowerShell Core.
I've tested and confirmed that the script runs without error using Windows PowerShell 5.1.14393.4467.

Fair warning: the script may take over one hour to complete, depending on the city you're conducting your search in (Chicago, IL took 1 hour, 42 minutes, & 52 seconds and produced 7094 results). The purpose of this script is not to quickly gather apartment listing results, but to gather apartment listings and their granular details. That being said, the script will use 4 threads only because my CPU has four cores. Additionally, my machine has 12GB RAM so it's hard to say how well it will perform with any amount of RAM less than 12GB as I have seen the script's memory usage jump over 2GB in some cases.

You may also see a bunch of warnings like these:

My experience is, although they are annoying, they aren't pointing to anything erroneous, harmful, or compromising.
I just close them all.

Before you begin, you will need these environment variables set up:

• Google Places - GooglePlaces_API_Key
• Google Distance - GoogleDistance_API_Key
• Google GeoCode - GoogleGeoCode_API_Key

1. Launch Windows PowerShell
2. Clone this repo and change directory to the repo's root folder.

git clone https://github.com/nstevens1040/Get-ApartmentListings.git
cd .\Get-ApartmentListings\

3. Run the script (example below).

. .\Get-ApartmentListings.ps1 -City Chicago -State_Code IL -Keep_csv_file -Commute_To '1060 W Addison St, Chicago, IL 60613'

I'll write more about the parameters if necessary, but for now I'll rely on the idea that they are, more or less, self explanatory.

• City - The city you're conducting your search in.
• State_Code - The state where you're conducting your search formatted as a two-character state code (ex. Illinois is IL, California is CA, New York is NY, etc.)
• Keep_csv_file - The database that is generated from the results gets converted to a datatable and exported as a CSV file so that it can be used as input for excel2table.exe to create a nice HTML table. This switch tells the script not to delete the CSV file, because otherwise it will.
• Commute_To - Optional parameter to include a string address to where you expect to be commuting regularly so that a commute time column will be included in the results as a sortable member.

4. View your results. The final table of results will be an HTML file located at %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\AllListings.html or C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Desktop\AllListings.html. The filename may vary if you've run the script more than once without deleting the results from the last time you ran the script.