---
title: "How to Scrape Quebec Real Estate Listings From Centris.ca Without Code"
slug: "scrape-centris-quebec-real-estate-data"
type: "blog-post"
url: "https://automationbyexperts.com/blog/scrape-centris-quebec-real-estate-data"
date: "2026-08-29"
category: "Web Scraping"
tags: ["real estate", "web scraping", "Centris", "Quebec", "price monitoring", "Apify"]
read_time: 8
author: "Youssef Farhan"
---

# How to Scrape Quebec Real Estate Listings From Centris.ca Without Code

> Pull structured property data, prices and broker details from Centris.ca with a no-code actor, then track price changes over time by keying on MLS number instead of row position.

## How Do You Get Real Estate Data From Centris.ca Without Writing a Scraper?

Run a ready-made actor against a Centris search URL and it hands you back structured JSON, CSV or Excel in minutes. Centris.ca is Quebec's largest real-estate portal, and it has no public API for outside developers, so the only practical way to pull listings at scale is a hosted scraper like the [Centris.ca Real Estate Scraper](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/centris-property-scraper). You paste in a Centris search link, filtered however you like (city, price range, property type), and the actor crawls every result page plus every individual listing to collect the full record: no browser automation to write, no proxies to manage, no code beyond a search URL.

This matters for three groups specifically. Investors want to spot underpriced listings before an agent calls them back. Brokers want to see what competing agencies are charging in the same postal codes. And anyone building a property aggregator or a local market report needs current Quebec inventory without manually copying rows out of a browser tab.

### Where do you get the search URL?

Go to centris.ca, apply the filters you want (city, borough, price, property type, number of bedrooms), and copy the resulting URL from the address bar once the results load. That filtered URL is the actor's input. Starting from the homepage or an unfiltered URL is the most common way this fails on the first try, because Centris renders an empty result shell until a real search has been applied.

## What Data Fields Does the Centris Scraper Return?

Each listing comes back as one record with the following fields:

- Listing title

- Price (CAD)

- Full address

- Property type (condo, duplex, single-family, and so on)

- Bedrooms, bathrooms and total room count

- Living area and lot size

- Year built

- Full description text

- Characteristics and features list

- Broker name and agency

- All gallery image URLs

- Listing URL and MLS number

The MLS number is the field that matters most if you plan to track anything over time: it is the one stable identifier for a listing across multiple scrapes, and it is what you should key your database on rather than the row order or the URL, both of which shift as listings are added and removed.

## How Much Does It Cost to Scrape Quebec Property Listings?

Apify actors in this category are billed on Apify's usage-based platform pricing rather than a flat monthly fee, so the cost scales with how many listings you pull and how often you run it. A one-off pull of a few hundred listings from a single borough typically burns a small fraction of Apify's free monthly platform credit; a recurring daily run across a whole region during an active buying season is the scenario worth watching, since it adds up over a month. Check the current price shown on the [actor's page](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/centris-property-scraper) before you schedule anything recurring, since Apify pricing is set per actor and can change.

## How Do You Automate Price Tracking Over Time?

Schedule the actor to run daily or weekly against the same search URL, pull the dataset after each run with the Apify API, and diff it against your last snapshot keyed on MLS number. New MLS numbers are new listings, missing ones are sold or delisted, and a lower price on a number you already have is a price cut worth flagging. A minimal version of that loop looks like this:

```
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("fayoussef/centris-property-scraper").call(
    run_input={"searchUrl": "https://www.centris.ca/en/properties~for-sale~montreal"}
)

items = list(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items())

by_mls = {item["mlsNumber"]: item for item in items if item.get("mlsNumber")}
print(f"Pulled {len(by_mls)} listings")

# Compare against yesterday's snapshot (loaded however you store it)
# for mls, listing in by_mls.items():
#     old = previous_snapshot.get(mls)
#     if old and listing["price"]
```

Store each day's snapshot as a flat file or a small table and this becomes a real price-drop alert with almost no infrastructure.

## What Can You Actually Do With the Data Once You Have It?

Raw listings turn into a market read once you aggregate a few of them together. Group by borough and property type, then compute price per square foot from the price and living-area fields: that single number is what lets you compare a condo in one neighborhood against a condo three boroughs over, which the listing price alone does not tell you. Investors run this weekly across a shortlist of boroughs to spot listings sitting well under the local median, since an underpriced property relative to its neighbors is a stronger signal than an absolute price threshold.

Brokers and agencies use the same pull differently: filter to listings from competing agencies in their own postal codes and watch which ones get a price cut or disappear (sold) fastest. That turnover rate, not the asking price alone, is what tells an agency whether a competitor is pricing realistically or sitting on stale inventory.

If you also run the [Kijiji.ca scraper](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/kijiji-ca-scraper) against the same city, you can cross-reference Centris agent listings against Kijiji's mix of private and dealer postings to see how much of the local market is for-sale-by-owner versus brokered, which is invisible from either source alone.

## What Goes Wrong When Scraping Centris and How Do You Fix It?

The most common surprise is that the same search URL does not return the same set of listings twice. Centris inventory turns over daily: agents pull sold properties, new ones get listed, and the result count on a broad city-wide search can shift by dozens between two runs a day apart. Treating row position or scrape order as an identity for a listing breaks any price-history logic, because listing three in Monday's run is not listing three in Tuesday's run.

The fix is the same one already mentioned: always key on MLS number, never on position or on the listing URL alone (URLs can be re-issued when a listing is re-posted). If you are building a dataset that spans weeks, keep every day's raw pull rather than overwriting the last one, so you can reconstruct when a price actually changed instead of just knowing what it is today.

A second, smaller gotcha: very broad searches (an entire city with no price or type filter) can return thousands of results, which is slower and more expensive to crawl than it needs to be for most use cases. Narrowing the Centris filters before you copy the URL, rather than scraping everything and filtering afterward, keeps runs fast and cheap.

## Which Other Real Estate Portals Can You Scrape the Same Way?

The same pattern (paste a search URL, get structured JSON back) works on other regional property portals too. For the Greek market there is the [Spitogatos.gr scraper](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/spitogatos-scraper), which pulls 25+ attributes including GPS coordinates from Greece's largest listings site, and the [XE.gr property scraper](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/xe-gr-scraper), which covers Greek listings across five languages including advertiser phone numbers. All three actors, plus every other property scraper published, are listed on the [real estate scrapers category page](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/category/real-estate-scrapers), which is the fastest way to see what regions are already covered.

If your target market is not on that list yet, the [actor request form](https://automationbyexperts.com/suggest) is free to use. Requests that name a specific site and use case are the ones that get built first.

## Frequently Asked Questions

**Does the Centris scraper need a login or an API key from Centris itself?**No. It works from a public search URL and does not require a Centris account, since it reads the same publicly rendered listing pages a browser would.

**Can it scrape a single listing page instead of a whole search?**Yes. Point it at one listing URL and it returns just that record with the full field set, which is useful for monitoring a handful of specific properties rather than a whole search.

**What format does the data come out in?**JSON, CSV or Excel, chosen at export time on the Apify platform, so it drops straight into a spreadsheet or a database without extra parsing.

**Is this legal to use for market research?**Scraping public listing pages for your own analysis is common practice in real estate research, but always review Centris's terms and consult a lawyer if you plan to republish the data commercially rather than just analyze it internally.

**How current is the data once a run finishes?**It reflects Centris's listings at the moment the actor crawls them, so a run completed a few minutes ago is effectively live inventory, not a cached snapshot.

## Actors used in this guide

- [XE.gr Property Scraper - Greek Real Estate](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/xe-gr-scraper): It scrapes Greek real-estate listings from XE.gr - prices, size, rooms, GPS coordinates, amenities, photos and advert…
- [Centris.ca Real Estate Scraper](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/centris-property-scraper): It extracts property listings from Centris.ca - Quebec's largest real-estate portal - including title, price, full ad…
- [Spitogatos.gr Real Estate Scraper](https://automationbyexperts.com/apify/spitogatos-scraper): Scrape 25+ attributes per Greek property listing in English & Greek