WBMBOT

A simple selenium based python bot to check the website of WBM Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Berlin-Mitte mbH for new flats and automatically apply for them, since only the first 1000 applicants will be considered in the random selection process for apartment viewing.

Getting started

To install all dependencies you can use the conda package manager and create an environment from the environment.yaml file located in the project directory as follows:

# create conda environment form environment file
conda env create -f environment.yaml

# activate conda environment
conda activate wbmbot

If you don't have conda installed I recommend installing it or installing all dependencies manually (good luck with that). Alternatively you can install the dependencies using pip, since all of them should be available on there too.

To start the bot simply run the below command in your terminal in the project directory:

python3 main.py

If you are running the bot for the first time the bot will start the setup process asking all the necessary information for applications on wbm.de. Note that these informations will be saved unencrypted to a local config.yaml file in human readable format!! If you don't want to use the setup process for this, you can just create a config.yaml file yourself in the project directory of format:

city: "cityname"
email: "email@adress1,email@adress2,..."
first_name: "Max"
filter: "keyword1,keyword2,..."
last_name: "Mustermann"
phone: "0123456789"
street: "Streetname 42"
wbs: "yes"
wbs_date: "23/04/1972"
wbs_num: "WBS 160"
wbs_rooms: '2'
zip_code: '12345'

Parameters

usage: main.py [-h] [-H] [-t] [-i INTERVAL]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.
  -H, --headless_off    If set, turn off headless run. The bot will run in the opened browser.
  -t, --test            If set, run test-run on the test data. This does not actually connect to wbm.de.
  -i, --interval        Set the time interval in minutes to check for new flats on wbm.de. [default: 5]

Filtering

Currently the bot will apply to all available flats on the WBM website, which most of the time is only like one per every 3 days anyway.. However a filtering feature is planned and will (probably) be implemented soon.

Additional

The bot will save all successfull applications to a log.txt file. This file is also used to apply to every flat only once, so don't delete it unless you want to reapply to all available flats! During the setupt process you will be able to submit multiple email adresses. The bot will then apply for every flat with your user data once per email adress. Per default wbm.de will be reloaded and checked for new flats every 5 minutes. There currently is no timeout or bot check / captcha on the website (lets hope it stays like this), but I dont think its necessary to check more often, as there are not many flats available anyway (in contrast to e.g. immoscout24).

Let the hunt begin! Good luck!