Rental Data Entry Automation

A small Python project that scrapes rental listings from a website and enters each one into a Google Form automatically. The form responses end up in a Google Sheet, so I don't have to copy and paste anything by hand.

I built this to practice web scraping and browser automation together, using a practice rental site (a Zillow clone) as the data source.

What it does

1. Downloads the listings page and reads the price, address and link of every property.
2. Cleans up the text (for example, removing the "+" and "/mo" parts from prices).
3. Opens a Google Form in Chrome and fills in one entry per property.
4. Submits the form and moves on to the next listing.

Demo

Built with

• Python 3
• requests for downloading the page
• beautifulsoup4 for parsing the HTML
• selenium for controlling Chrome
• python-dotenv for keeping the URLs out of the code

Project structure

Rental Data Entry Automation/
├── main.py     # scraping and form submission
├── .env        # site URL and form URL (not committed)
└── README.md

Setup

Install the packages:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4 selenium python-dotenv

You also need Google Chrome installed. Recent versions of Selenium download the matching driver on their own.

Create a Google Form with three short answer questions in this order: Property Address, Rental Price / Month, Property Link. Link the form to a Google Sheet if you want the responses collected.

Then create a .env file in the project folder:

SITE_URL=your_site_link
FORM_URL=your_google_form_link

Note: the script finds the form fields using XPaths from my own form. If your form is different, you will need to update those XPaths in main.py.

Running it

python main.py

Chrome opens and the script submits one entry for each listing. The browser stays open when it finishes so you can check the result.

How it works

Loading the URLs. Both URLs come from the .env file.

load_dotenv()

URL = os.getenv("SITE_URL")
FORM_URL = os.getenv("FORM_URL")

Fetching the page. The page is downloaded and parsed with BeautifulSoup. If something goes wrong, the script prints the error and stops.

try:
    r = requests.get(url=URL)
    data = r.text
    soup = BeautifulSoup(data, "html.parser")
except Exception as e:
    print(f"Error fetching the webpage: {e}")
    return

Getting the data. Each value is found by its tag and class name, then cleaned with a list comprehension. For example, a price like $3,000+/mo becomes $3,000.

prices = soup.find_all(name="span", class_="PropertyCardWrapper__StyledPriceLine")
price_list = [price.text.replace("+", "/").split("/")[0] for price in prices]

addresses = soup.find_all(name="address")
address_list = [
    address.getText().replace(" | ", "").strip() for address in addresses
]

links = soup.find_all(name="a", class_="StyledPropertyCardDataArea-anchor")
link_list = [link.get("href") for link in links]

Starting the browser. The detach option keeps Chrome open after the script ends. I don't call driver.quit() for the same reason.

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_experimental_option("detach", True)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)

Filling in the form. For each listing the script opens the form, waits two seconds, types the values into the fields and clicks submit. The page load and the submit click are wrapped in try/except so one failure doesn't stop the whole run. (The XPaths are shortened here. The full ones are in main.py.)

for i in range(len(price_list)):
    try:
        driver.get(url=FORM_URL)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error occurred while navigating to the form: {e}")
        continue
    sleep(2)

    address_input = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "...")
    price_input = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "...")
    link_input = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "...")
    button = driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "...")

    address_input.send_keys(address_list[i])
    price_input.send_keys(price_list[i])
    link_input.send_keys(link_list[i])
    try:
        button.click()
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error occurred while clicking the submit button: {e}")

What I learned

• Scraping a page with BeautifulSoup and cleaning the text
• Controlling a browser with Selenium and finding elements with XPath
• Keeping configuration in a .env file instead of the code
• Adding basic error handling so one bad step doesn't crash everything

Things to improve

This is a learning project, so there are probably bugs and rough edges.

• Add r.raise_for_status() after the request so HTTP errors like a 404 are caught
• Some addresses come through duplicated or with the building name stuck to the street, so the address cleaning needs work
• Replace sleep(2) with Selenium's explicit waits
• Use shorter, more reliable locators instead of long absolute XPaths
• Add a headless mode and save the scraped data to a CSV as a backup

Author

VISHAL YADAV

• GitHub: @VISHAL108-Mech
• LinkedIn: vishal-yadav-2a91a7428
• Email: vy4122000@gmail.com