How to Build a Real Estate Deal Scanner with Python + RentCast API

How to Build a Real Estate Deal Scanner I built a Python-based property scanner that searches 7+ sources for below-market real estate deals, values them against RentCast + Zillow data, and pushes the top deals to Telegram every morning. Here's the architecture and how you can build your own. The Problem Investors manually check 5-10 websites daily looking for deals. They miss opportunities because they can't be everywhere at once. The Solution An automated scanner that: Scrapes HUD HomeStore, Bid4Assets, Auction.com, Redfin, Craigslist, LandWatch Deduplicates by normalized address Values each property against RentCast AVM + county assessor data Scores deals 1-100 based on price-to-value ratio Pushes top 20 to Telegram at 7 AM daily Tech Stack Python 3.9+ aiohttp — async HTTP requests BeautifulSoup — HTML parsing SQLite — persistent storage RentCast API — property valuations ($0-50/mo) Brave Search API — fallback valuations Jinja2 — HTML report generation Deal Scoring def deal_score ( p