Build vs Buy Scraped Data

Making the building versus buying decision with Short Term Rental (STR) data

Balancing building versus buying is a constant evaluation for business as they grow, this is especially true with scraped data. When deciding on if your business should build out internal teams and technology for STR scrapping or if buying STR scraped data is the right decision we have laid out some of the pros and cons to help. 

What is Web Scraping? 

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. It can be used for a variety of purposes, such as market research, competitive intelligence, and price monitoring. There are two main ways to get scraped data: you can buy it from a data provider, or you can build your own web scraping tool and scrape the data yourself.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. Buying scraped data can be quick and easy, but offers trade offs on control of data collected and quality of data delivered. Building your own web scraping tool can be more time-consuming and expensive, but it gives you more control over the data collection process and ensures that the data is of high quality.

Is Web Scraping legal?

Whether or not web scraping is legal depends on a number of factors, including the country in which you are scraping, the website you are scraping from, and the purpose for which you are scraping. In general, web scraping is legal if you are scraping publicly available data and you do not violate the website's terms of service. However, there are some exceptions. For example, you may not be able to scrape personal data or copyrighted content.

Here are some things to keep in mind when web scraping:

• Make sure you are scraping publicly available data.

• Do not violate the website's terms of service.

• Be respectful of the website's resources.

• Do not scrape too much data at once.

• Use a web scraping tool that is designed to be respectful of websites.

If you are unsure whether or not web scraping is legal in your jurisdiction, you should consult with an attorney. Depending on your company's relationship with the websites you are scraping, you may violate existing agreements with them so it is important to consult your internal legal team. 

Pros & Cons of Buying Scraped Data

There are many benefits to buying scraped data namely the process is a quick as data can be moved and since data is being sold to multiple customers you can reduce costs of your company doing it on their own. There are some draw backs as well which will vary by data aggregation company.

Pros:

• Quick and easy to get started, as quickly as data can be transfered over

• No need to build or maintain a web scraping tool which can cost up to $1M/yr for engineering salaries, proxy and server costs. 

• Keep your engineers allocated to your highest ROI projects, not data scraping. 

• The data is typically well-formatted and easy to use as the scraping team has packaged the data for others to use and is often made uniform across sources. 

• Can be a cost-effective option for small businesses or projects with limited budgets

• Years of Scraping Technical expertise. Instantly add scraping experts to support your team! 

• Push any legal questions off to the scraping company 

• Get historical data that may take you years to build up instantly. 

When you sign up with Hungry Robots you get over a decade of STR scraping expertise and experts to help you leverage the data. We come ready with historical data going back to 2020 allowing you to build products that have historical context already without having to wait years to build up. We have been scraping since 2012 and have monitoring layers to notify us of updates and site changes to quickly adapt to changes. 

Lets face it, we are all tight on capacity for new projects. When you buy scraped data you allow your engineers to be focused on the higher ROI projects such as building the best in class products on top of the scraped data and serving your customers. 

Curious to learn more about our scraped data? Speak to an expert today! 

Cons:

• The data may not be up-to-date

• The quality of the data may not be guaranteed

• The data may be incomplete or inaccurate

• You may be limited to the data that is available from the data provider

• Data provider might not fully understand your use case

With Hungry Robots our scrapers are always running to keep the freshest data out there. We also rely on multiply methodologies to find new listings and can find them faster than other data providers. Our scraper methodologies result in 20% - 30% wider listing coverage then competitors due to our extensive expertise scraping STR data. 

Best of all, since we have built products on top of STR scraped data for over a decade we understand your use case. If you have a totally new use case, we ramp up quickly! We provide you with our standard delivery plus full payload to ensure you capture everything you need. Reach out if you would like to learn more! 

Pros & Cons of Building your own Scrapers

Building in house can come with plenty of pros such as having complete control over the data pipeline. With complete control does come with additional head count, overhead, capacity constraints and time. 

Pros:

• You have complete control over the data collection process

• You can ensure that the data is of high quality

• You can collect data from any website, even if it is protected by a paywall or login. It is important to verify that this is legal and you do not breach terms of service of course. 

• You can customize the data collection process to meet your specific needs

Having full control over the data pipeline allows you lots of flexibility and control which is wonderful! Hungry Robots sets out to understand your current use case, data you use today and makes available at a minimum what you use today, the full pay load of what we receive from scraping and the ability to add to your wishlist of data for us to look for.  Curious if we can deliver everything you are looking for? Lets chat! 

Cons:

• It can be time-consuming and expensive to build a web scraping tool. Identifying how to get around each sites specific roadblocks to scraping can require many sprints of work and proxy costs. 

• You need to have the necessary technical skills to build and maintain a web scraping tool. You will have to hire the right talent if you do not already have it on your team. 

• You need to keep your web scraping tool up-to-date to ensure that it works with new websites and changes in web scraping techniques. Sites aim to block scraping so any tool will require regular maintenance and ensure changes are updated for. 

• Historical data is missing. If you are scraping calendar data, as soon as today becomes yesterday it may not be captured by your scraping. 

Hungry Robots brings you all historical data to avoid having to wait up to a year for full calendar data to be collected and data can be delivered as quickly as it moves through the interwebs. If web scraping is not your companies core competency, avoid getting distracted! We are here to help, just reach out. 

So, which approach is right for you?

The best approach for you will depend on your specific needs and budget. If you need to get started quickly and don't have the resources to build your own web scraping tool, then buying scraped data may be a good option for you. However, if you need to ensure that the data is of high quality and you have the resources to build your own web scraping tool, then building your own tool may be a better option. Either option you consider, it is always a great idea to talk to data providers first to see what other factors you may not be taking into consideration as well as to get all costs involved to compare your options. 

Here are some additional factors to consider when making your decision:

• The size of your project

• The budget for your project

• The technical skills of your current team

• The time you have available and team roadmap

• The importance of data quality

• The importance of historical data 

No matter which approach you choose, it is important to do your research and select a reputable data provider or web scraping tool.