Scraping the VRBO API
If you need market data for short-term rentals, we suggest taking a look at our Airbnb Data Scraper, as they take a much friendlier approach to allowing the public to scrape their data compared to VRBO, which only allows us to scrape very limited rental data from the publicly accessible VRBO website.
However, if you absolutely must scrape properties on VRBO, we’ll walk through how to do it using HAR Files that do not violate VRBO’s Terms of Service or risk getting your VRBO account banned for scraping. The only catch is that you’ll only be able to scrape basic information, like listing name, price, number of beds, baths, and link to the official VRBO website.
1. Browse VRBO Listings
To start scraping the VRBO web API, simply head to the VRBO Website and enter any search term or area you want to download the listings data for. Then right click on the page and hit “Inspect” to open up developer tools (this will begin recording your network traffic).
Under developer tools, you can select the “Network” tab to get a closer look at what’s going on, specifically look for graphql requests as you move the map - these will contain the raw JSON data that VRBO sends to your browser. Browse around the map to keep loading in more data - you’ll see more of these graphql rows populate under the Network tab.
2. Export a HAR File
Once you’re done browsing the VRBO listings you want to scrape, look for a down arrow under the Network tab in developer tools labeled “Export HAR…” and click it. This will download a HAR file containing the raw VRBO vacation home data sent to your browser containing the listings shown on the map. Then upload this file to the HAR File Web Scraper and look for the following group:
To make sure you have the correct group, look for priceSection in the fields section and make sure it’s present. If you don’t see that, you’ll need to go back and re-generate a new HAR file and try again.
3. Download VRBO Data
On the parsed data page, you’ll see a collection labeled data › propertySearch › propertySearchListings with a row for each listing shown on the map. Click the Download button to collect this data as a CSV file which you can use in Excel or similar spreadsheet programs.
Listing Data
As mentioned earlier, the VRBO response data is very limited compared to what you can Scrape from Airbnb. Below is a quick summary of the fields you’ll be able to scrape for individual VRBO listings. Some of these fields will be returned as strings which you’ll need to parse out to get the numerical data (e.g. number of reviews).
- VRBO ID
- VRBO URL
- Sponsored or Organic
- Listing Title
- Number of People, Beds, Baths
- All Images
- Nightly Price
- Average Rating
- Number of Reviews
Listing Images
If you’re interested in downloading all of the images for the VRBO listings you scraped, then you can look for the data › propertySearch › propertySearchListings › mediaSection › gallery › media collection where you’ll see up to 1,000s of images for all of the listings. When you download the CSV, the left side of the CSV will contain data about the images and the right will contain columns referencing the listing to which the image belongs to.
If you want to download the actual image files, you’ll need to use a media downloader to visit all of the URLs and download their contents locally.
Removing Duplicates
When browsing around the VRBO search results, it’s likely you’ll get some overlap and individual listings will appear in multiple requests. Therefore, we suggest paying attention to the id column in your listings dataset and deduplicate the data by this column to remove any duplicates.
Why Scrape VRBO?
If you’re in the short-term rental business or one of many property management companies, you’ve undoubtedly heard of VRBO who is now owned by Expedia Group. Compared to Airbnb, VRBO specializes in only listing full vacation rental homes on the rental market. For these businesses, the public data behind listings on VRBO can determine occupancy rates for varying locations and times of year, helping property owners & managers in setting dynamic pricing to stay competitive.
If you’re wondering how you can tap into this data for profit, there unfortunately is not a VRBO endorsed API connection available for public use or VRBO integration to your property management software. There are a few third-party data aggregators out there, who scrape Airbnb & VRBO and then offer these aggregated data summaries for sale (usually charging a price per market).
These can be good if you have very simple needs or are just getting started, but they arguably offer little competitive advantage if you’re looking at the exact same data sets that everyone else has access to, which is why scraping the raw data can prove very valuable depending on your situation.