I got tired of refreshing housing websites, so I made a bot do it
By Raman Y. Avarzaman
Finding housing in Maastricht is weirdly exhausting.
If you have looked for a place in the Netherlands, you probably know the routine. A listing appears, everyone sees it at the same time, and within minutes it feels like you are already late. You refresh tabs. You compare rent, location, surface area, availability dates. You send messages and hope the place is not gone by the time someone replies.
After a while I stopped thinking, "I should check again," and started thinking, "why am I doing this manually?"
So I automated it.
I built a small scraper that watches a popular housing website for new listings and sends me a Telegram notification when something new appears. Nothing fancy on the surface. It checks regularly, saves what it has seen before, and only pings me when there is actually something new. But that little difference matters a lot when the market is this competitive.
The Netherlands has a real housing crisis, and Maastricht is not an exception. Good places disappear fast. Cheap places in good locations disappear even faster. I did not want to spend my whole day refreshing a website just to maybe catch a listing five minutes earlier than someone else.
The first version was rough, but useful. Over time I made it more reliable:
- it runs in Docker on my VPS
- it checks every few minutes
- it stores listings in SQLite so it can tell what is new
- it sends Telegram alerts with the important details
- it cleans up old listings so the database does not grow forever
- it uses delays and caching instead of hammering the website like an idiot
The best part is that it actually helped.
Using this setup, I found myself and my partner two studios and one apartment at amazing prices, in amazing locations. Yes, we moved three times. Not ideal, but also very Dutch-student-housing-core. Each move came from catching the right listing at the right moment, and the bot made that possible without turning the housing search into a full time job.
What I like about this project is that it is not "AI" or magic. It is just a boring automation that solves a boring pain very well. That is usually my favorite kind of project.
The logic is simple:
- open the listings page
- collect the current available listings
- compare them against the local database
- notify me only about listings I have not seen before
- repeat
The scraper has been running on the VPS for months now without drama. That is the real benchmark for me. Not whether it looks impressive in a screenshot, but whether I can forget about it and still trust it to keep working.
There is also something funny about the emotional side of it. Housing search makes you feel powerless because timing matters so much and the system is not built around humans calmly making decisions. Automating the monitoring part did not fix the housing crisis. Obviously. But it did give me back a little bit of control.
And sometimes that is enough: not a grand product, not a startup idea, just a script that watches the chaos and taps you on the shoulder when it is time to move.