I recently received the news that I was being forced to leave my rented flat in less than 2 months due to the landlord selling the property, which meant having to find somewhere else fast. This meant having to navigate Bristol’s notoriously difficult rental market, where viewings on desirable properties have been known to be all booked up within minutes of them being uploaded. From previous experience I knew that Rightmove’s ‘instant’ alerts function would not suffice, as these can take over an hour to reach my inbox. What I had to do in the past was refresh the page manually every few minutes all day, which was not ideal for my productivity nor my mental health. This time around I decided to create an automated solution using Clojure and AWS.

How does it work?

A Lambda function written in Clojure scrapes the Rightmove search results page every 4 minutes. The Lambda input event is a JSON map of search criteria. Any newly uploaded URLs are written into a message that is sent to an SNS topic which is subscribed to by my email address. New URLs are also written to a DynamoDB table that is used by the Lambda function to determine which URLs have yet to be sent to the SNS topic.

Use it yourself

If you want to use this yourself to configure alerts then all you need is an AWS account, plus Docker and the SAM CLI installed on your machine. You can then insert your own search criteria and email address to template.yaml, before running sam build followed by sam deploy.

For more detailed usage instructions or to contribute, you can view the code here.