rent-toronto

Find apartment advertisements that are relevant to you. Just configure the script with your criteria and receive emails with matching rental properties in Toronto.

Here's how it works: advertisements are scraped from Kijiji based on provided search criteria. Some of the basic criteria include price range, work location, and relevant unit types. After discarding duplicate adverts, the geographic coordinates are retrieved using the Google Maps Geocoding API. The coordinates are tested against a provided KML file to determine if they fall within your range. Any remaining adverts are sent to the provided email addresses via Amazon SES.

Hopefully this will help save you from wading through pages and pages of reposted and irrelevant advertisements when looking for a place to live.

The original idea for this project was inspired by toronto-apartment-finder. Please go check it out!

Usage

Prerequisites

• Python 3.6+, for type hinting
• Redis, for caching seen advertisements
• Google Maps Geocoding API key
• Amazon SES credentials

Also make sure to install the Python requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

python main.py kml_filename

If you're curious how to generate a KML file, you can use Google MyMaps to draw and export your desired living area on a map. Your KML file can contain multiple different polygons

Configuring

This script is configured via environment variables. Here are the available options:

Required

Variable	Description
GOOGLE_GEO_API_KEY	API key for the Google Maps Geocoding API
FROM_ADDRESS	Email to send the alerts from
TO_ADDRESSES	Comma-separated list of email address to send the alerts to

Kijiji Criteria

Variable	Description	Default
POSTAL	Postal code of your workplace (or any place you want to centre your search around)	M5J1E6
POSTAL_LAT	Latitude of the above postal code (saves a geocoding call)	43.645100
POSTAL_LON	Longitude of the above postal code	-79.381576
SEARCH_DISTANCE	Maximum distance to search from the above postal code, in km	5
MAX_PAGES	Number of Kijiji pages to search per unit type	5
MIN_PRICE	Minimum price for an advertisement	1500
MAX_PRICE	Maximum price for an advertisement	3000
SELECTED_UNIT_TYPES	Comma seperated list of unit types you want to search	bc,1b

Valid unit types are:

Unit type	Description
bc	Bachelor
1b	One bedroom
1b+d	One bedroom plus den
2b	Two bedrooms
3b	Three bedrooms
4b+	Four or more bedrooms
hs	House

Redis

Variable	Description	Default
REDIS_HOST	Address where Redis is hosted	localhost

Deploying

Feel free to use the provided Dockerfile to easily run this script in a production environment.