How to Scrape Car Listings from AutoTrader, AutoScout24 and Kijiji

Used-vehicle pricing moves weekly, and the only way to price against a market is to see the market. That means listings — thousands of them, refreshed often, with enough fields to compare like against like.

Copying them by hand is not a plan. Writing a scraper per marketplace is a maintenance commitment most teams underestimate: every site changes its markup, and each one has its own pagination and anti-bot behaviour. This guide covers the third option — running a maintained cloud actor per marketplace and getting a spreadsheet out.

Which car marketplaces can be scraped?

Eight are covered as ready-to-run actors today:

All eight live in the vehicle scrapers category.

What data do you actually get per listing?

The field set is broadly consistent across marketplaces, which is what makes cross-market comparison possible:

• Identity — make, model, year, trim, VIN where published
• Condition — odometer reading, transmission, drivetrain, fuel type, engine, body style, colour
• Commercial — asking price in local currency, date listed, listing URL
• Seller — dealer or private flag, dealer name, city and region, and on some marketplaces the seller's phone number
• Media — every photo URL attached to the listing

The AutoTrader South Africa and Kijiji actors are the ones that return seller phone numbers, which matters if you are sourcing inventory rather than only analysing prices. RVTrader returns the widest field set at 55+ per listing.

How do you run one?

The workflow is the same for every marketplace, and it takes about two minutes:

1. Filter on the site itself. Go to the marketplace and search the way you normally would — make, model, year range, price band, distance from a postcode. Get the results page looking right.
2. Copy that URL. All your filters are encoded in it. This is the single most useful trick here: you never configure the scraper, you configure the search.
3. Paste it into the actor and set a result limit. The limit is your cost control. Leave it open to take every page of results.
4. Run and export. Pagination, proxies and anti-bot handling happen in the cloud. Download CSV, JSON or Excel.

If you want it weekly, add an Apify schedule and a webhook into Google Sheets. Then the market comes to you.

What does it cost to pull 10,000 listings?

Vehicle actors are priced per result, generally around $0.001 per listing. So:

• 1,000 listings ≈ $1
• 10,000 listings ≈ $10
• The $5 free credit on a new account covers roughly 5,000 listings before you pay anything

If you are building a training dataset rather than watching a market, run the per-result AutoTrader Canada variant, which skips detail-page fetches and pulls from listing cards only — far cheaper per record when you need volume more than depth.

What do people build with this?

Dealer pricing

Pull every listing matching your inventory's make, model and year band in your region, weekly. Compare your asking price against the distribution rather than against a gut feel. Cars priced above the 75th percentile for their mileage band are the ones sitting on your lot.

Inventory sourcing

Filter for private sellers below a price threshold in a radius, with phone numbers where the marketplace publishes them. This is where the South Africa and Kijiji actors earn their place.

Price prediction models

Vehicle listings are unusually good training data: a clear target variable (price), strong numeric features (year, odometer), and clean categoricals (make, model, trim, drivetrain). Tens of thousands of rows across several countries is a genuinely useful dataset, and the low-cost per-result actors exist for exactly this.

Market reports

Aggregate by province, brand or year and you have the raw material for an automotive market intelligence report — the kind people pay for.

What will go wrong

Three honest caveats:

• Not every field is on every listing. VIN and phone number depend on what the seller published. Expect gaps and handle them in your analysis rather than assuming a full grid.
• Currencies and units differ. AutoScout24 spans eight countries; prices are in local currency and distances in kilometres. Normalise before you compare across markets.
• Marketplaces change. Layouts get redesigned and actors need updating when they do. That maintenance is the actual value of using a maintained actor rather than a script you wrote once — but it does mean occasional fix windows.

Frequently asked questions

Start with one search URL

Pick the marketplace you check most often, filter it to the vehicles you actually care about, and run that URL through the matching actor once. Ten minutes and no cost on the free credit will tell you whether this replaces whatever you are doing manually today.