I was working for a real estate agency client when Covid came along. Everyone had to stay home, so they couldn't sell or rent any properties. It was a tough time for the company, but they tried to make the best of it.
During the three months of lockdown in Spain, they decided to create tools that would help them work faster and better once the lockdown was over, so they could recover from the losses.
To explain the main problem they faced:they had more than ten agents making calls to find clients and then spending a lot of time entering property details into various real estate websites. This was a time-consuming task because houses have a lot of information to input.
That is why they hired me for, to automate this process. But the real estate platforms were clever and tried to stop me from automating their websites using scrapers. They protected their data very well. Even with my decent scraping skills, I couldn't break through their defenses. These companies had a lot of money and resources to stop web scrapers, probably a whole team of experts working on it, and I was just one guy.
The challenge turned out to be too difficult, and after a week of trying to automate their website, I gave up.
But while looking for alternatives, I realized that if I couldn't make requests from an external IP address, I could use their own IP. If I made a Chrome Extension that had access to their webpage, I could grab data from the agency backend and input it as if a regular person was doing it.
It took me another whole week to finish the Chrome extension, and it was a big success. My client was very impressed. It wasn't perfect, as it only worked for one real estate platform (the biggest one in Spain), and it wasn't completely automated.
However, I made it incredibly easy to use. The agents only needed to enter the property address and click three buttons, and all the data would be filled in. I turned a task that would normally take a human 30 minutes into a tool that did the same job in just 30 seconds.
Thanks to this Chrome Extension, my client could assign just one person to data entry, and the rest could focus on finding new clients.
Once again, I saw the power of automation. Some people worry that it will take away jobs, but I believe it can improve jobs and create new and more interesting opportunities for people.
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