Good apartments can be hard to come by in Osaka, and one of my friends had his eye on a specific unit that he knew was about to be put on the market. The only catch was that applications are handled on a first-come first-served basis, and his job wasn’t compatible with constantly refreshing the housing company’s homepage.

I wrote this web scraper in python to check available units against a list of desirable units, and send an email when a new listing appeared. Time was of the essence so the code is probably less elegant than it could be, but it worked!

Anyone looking to create something similar can have a look at the code here.