Detecting Fake Real Estate Listings: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Detection System

				
					const fetch = require('node-fetch');
const { HttpsProxyAgent } = require('https-proxy-agent');

// Proxy configuration
const proxyConfig = {
  host: 'your_proxy_host',
  port: 'your_proxy_port',
  username: 'your_proxy_username',
  password: 'your_proxy_password'
};

// Create proxy agent
const proxyAgent = new HttpsProxyAgent(`http://${proxyConfig.username}:${proxyConfig.password}@${proxyConfig.host}:${proxyConfig.port}`);

async function fetchZillowListings() {
  try {
    const response = await fetch(
      'https://www.zillow.com/async-create-search-page-state',
      {
        method: 'PUT',
        headers: {
          "user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
          accept: '*/*',
          'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7',
          'content-type': 'application/json',
          'sec-ch-ua':
            '"Chromium";v="128", "Not;A=Brand";v="24", "Google Chrome";v="128"',
          'sec-ch-ua-mobile': '?0',
          'sec-ch-ua-platform': '"macOS"',
          'sec-fetch-dest': 'empty',
          'sec-fetch-node': 'cors',
          'sec-fetch-site': 'same-origin',
          Referer: 'https://www.zillow.com/los-angeles-ca/',
          'Referrer-Policy': 'unsafe-url',
        },
        body: JSON.stringify({
          searchQueryState: {
            pagination: {},
            isMapVisible: true,
            mapBounds: {
              west: -118.88551790039062,
              east: -117.93794709960937,
              south: 33.870121297819686,
              north: 34.17175136070247,
            },
            regionSelection: [{ regionId: 12447, regionType: 6 }],
            filterState: {
              sortSelection: { value: 'globalrelevanceex' },
              isAllHomes: { value: true },
            },
            isListVisible: true,
          },
          wants: { cat1: ['listResults', 'mapResults'], cat2: ['total'] },
          requestId: 3,
          isDebugRequest: false,
        }),
        agent: proxyAgent // Add the proxy agent here
      }
    );

    if (!response.ok) {
      throw new Error(`HTTP error! status: ${response.status}`);
    }

    const data = await response.json();

    // Extract and return the listings
    return data.cat1.searchResults.mapResults;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error fetching Zillow listings:', error);
    return null;
  }
}

// Function to display the listings
function displayListings(listings) {
  if (!listings) {
    console.log('No listings found or error occurred.');
    return;
  }

  listings.forEach((listing, index) => {
    console.log(`Listing ${index + 1}:`);
    console.log(`Address: ${listing.address}`);
    console.log(`Price: $${listing.price}`);
    console.log(`Bedrooms: ${listing.beds}`);
    console.log(`Bathrooms: ${listing.baths}`);
    console.log(`Square Feet: ${listing.area}`);
    console.log(`Zillow Link: ${listing.detailUrl}`);
    console.log(`Image URL: ${listing.imgSrc}`);
    console.log('---');
  });
}

// Main function to run the script
async function main() {
  const listings = await fetchZillowListings();
  displayListings(listings);
}

main();