With a view to housing data recently, ~60% of the housing boom price gain has eroded (granted lots of regional variation).
In Seattle, the Price / Rental ratio remains too high from my taste, however that may change. Were they to drop, vulture
investors will take advantage of the market. I just need a way to monitor the market.
Craigslist provides an easy to parse interface. Really easy actually... Just drop that to a table in postgresql and
we're off and running.
def craigslist(url, query=''):
""" returns list of dict()s from url filter'd by query """
re_listing = re.compile('(([0-9]+)\.html"\>\$[0-9]+.*?\</a\>)')
re_price = re.compile('[0-9]+\.html"\>\$([0-9]+)')
prices = []
for line in urllib2.urlopen(url):
for m in re_listing.finditer(line):
d = { 'id': m.group(2) }
if query not in m.group(1):
continue
for p in re_price.finditer(m.group(1)):
d['price'] = p.group(1)
prices.append(d)
return prices