
Scraping Japan's Largest Real Estate Site with a Chrome Extension: Building an Automated Property Scoring Engine
If you've ever apartment-hunted in Japan, you know the drill. You open SUUMO -- the country's dominant real estate portal, think Zillow but with near-monopoly status -- and you're immediately staring at dozens of property listings. Each card shows rent, area, station distance, building age. But the numbers that actually matter for making a decision? Those aren't there. You have to calculate them yourself, mentally, for every single listing. Price per square meter. Total move-in cost (which in Japan includes a dizzying mix of deposits, "key money," brokerage fees, insurance, and lock replacement charges). Two-year total cost of living. Whether the asking price is reasonable compared to the neighborhood average. I got tired of doing this math on paper, so I built Bukken Scouter -- a pair of Chrome extensions that inject real-time financial analysis directly into SUUMO's listing pages. One for purchases (condos and houses), one for rentals. Both are built on Manifest V3, React, TypeScript
Continue reading on Dev.to
Opens in a new tab



