Automation is transforming the way we handle tasks, making our lives easier and our businesses more efficient. This post aims to guide you on how to start thinking about automations, helping you understand the foundational concepts and techniques to create effective automations.

Automation is a powerful tool that can significantly streamline your workflow. However, many people misunderstand its potential, either over-complicating it or underestimating its capabilities. This blog post will break down an example of an automation project, demonstrating how you can effectively utilize automation tools to achieve your goals.

In this example, we’ll be discussing an automation that involves finding real estate properties on Zillow, scraping the data, and then using another platform, PropStream, to gather additional information. The process initially seems complex, but by breaking it down into smaller, manageable steps, we can create an efficient and effective automation.

To start, let's identify the primary steps of our automation:

If you’re building an automation, having a specific target area can make your process more efficient. For this example, we created a Google Sheet filled with zip codes. We loop through each zip code, find properties on Zillow, andscrape the data.

Google Sheets is an excellent tool for storing and managing data between different automations. By separating the process into smaller steps, you can handle more complex tasks efficiently.

Step 1- Click on the automation get properties from Zillow by zip code

Step 2- Grab the multiple rows from the sheet

Step 3- Click on click to edit your list trigger

Step 4- Set the row and Loop

Step 5- Click on Send to google sheets to send all the data

Step 6- Click on Play steps to see run the automation

Okay, so I wanted to make this video as our kind of getting started video so that you can see how you should be starting to think about automations and how, uh, how different it might be from what you originally thought. And then also ironically, how similar it'll be with some tweaks when it comes to how you're, uh, how you're thinking about doing your automation.

So this is an example of an automation that I'm remaking here. You literally just guess and check your answers. And if you win the Zillow lottery, you can expect checks like this. I'm going to do whatever you want, but I'm going to start with this one, copy and paste, put it into prop stream. Not going to be, that's the automation.

We're going to find addresses or properties on Zillow, and then we are going to take them to that prop stream platform and scrape it from there. Now, instead of guessing and checking, or I really, I don't genuinely know what the point of that part is. Guessing and checking are why there's no sort of thought there, but what we can do is with Zillow, we can search by specific cities, states, zip codes, et cetera.

So if you are wanting to build this automation, you probably are going to have a more specific area to target. Or if you don't, you need to build one. So making this automation really easy. Was, uh, creating a Google sheet. And then I found all of the zip codes in California. So I just searched for a CSV of California zip codes, and I was able to grab that.

Then from here, we can set up a looping automation, which is going to take every single zip code from this Google sheet, type it into Zillow. Then we are going to scrape all of the properties in Zillow and put that in a Google sheet. Now that we have all of the property information from Zillow, we're going to have another automation that loops over the addresses in Zillow and finds how much of a mortgage they have on the PropStream platform.

So instead of it being this kind of five second thing we have here of guess and check and go. We wanted to separate this automation out to first scrape all the properties. Then once we have all the properties, we're going to take those properties and scrape it or, and then go to prop stream as well. So again, it's a multi step process here, but it's allowing you to do everything you want to do significantly faster, even though you're having to do.

A little bit more work per step. You're ending up with a final result that then would be able to go over every address and fill out this Google sheet with all of the open mortgage information and complete everything this person is talking about, um, with just having to click play steps a couple of times after you build this.

So really important when you're building your automation, try to break it down. Try to use Google sheets or platforms like that when you can to store data in between automations. And don't be afraid to break your automation up into multiple smaller automations. Instead of doing this all in one automation, which is doable.

It was extremely simple. By separating it out into two view. So we have two automations here. One is get properties from Zillow by zip code. And then another is scrape property info from prop stream. So there's two steps to this automation. The first one is looping over all of our zip codes to find properties for sale.

These properties that we scrape are then sent to this sheet, which gives us a little bit of information here. Not that we really need this. I just scraped it because. All of this was available on prop stream. So I could scrape it from here too. I probably will. Um, but this gets us all the addresses that we now need to loop over inside of prop stream, which is this automation.

So this one, then this one, and it made a really easy system to again, not have to just guess and oops, I missed it. Now I'm not going to go back, not have to guess and check. I don't want to do that. What did I click on and why can't I go back? Okay. So here are the automations get properties from Zillow by zip code.

We're using a list trigger. That way we can grab multiple rows from a Google sheet and loop over them. That's set up here in the list trigger. We have the row that we're running and the amount of times to loop, which I have set to two right now, uh, just because I'm demoing this goes to Zillow types in a zip code.

Wait, it's just a second click search. Sometimes it asks you if you're looking at for rent or for sale. So I click for sale and that's why that's marked, allow error. We scroll down for 15 seconds and then we're scraping all those details I was talking about. Then at the end of this, it is going to send all of that data to our Google sheet.

So I'll click play steps here and we should see this play out.

Uh, also I already have a bunch of listings in here, so I'll just scroll to the bottom really quick and see how many we have. Oops. That's a lot better than guessing and checking. Okay, 1127.

So here is the automation.

Didn't ask us for sale, but sometimes it does. It looks, I don't really know when it does or when it doesn't, but that's why we have that as allow error. Now we're scrolling and scraping. So if we wanted to get efficient with this, what we could probably do is try to rule out certain zip codes. For example, like the 5 million homes aren't probably interested in this, but who knows, maybe you were going to be guessing and checking the most expensive parts of LA for five hours anyways.

Um, but yeah, there's definitely optimizations you can make to this. If you have better criteria, uh, for me, I just wanted to get everything in California and kind of get an idea of how much, how common this is there at least. So we're stuck here for a second because we have that scroll down step that was scrolling down for 15 seconds.

That may be enough for this. That may be plenty for this, where there were only a few results, but on other pages where there's like a hundred, 200 results, it would still be scrolling right now. We can also see what steps it is on by going in the. Traffic control section over here and we'll see that it's running all of these scrape steps right now We'll see that some of the data has been scraped already the steps that have ran at least which is the price Information and the address and then when it's done looping over this a second time again Because I have it set to loop in the trigger here two times.

It'll paste all of this data into To my Google Sheet after this row here. So I'm gonna pause until that's ready just so this isn't a hour long video. Probably not an hour, but like a good five, five, ten minutes. While I'm waiting for this to run, I'm assuming these guys, or at least the ones that do this a lot, probably have like, Specific areas they try to focus on.

So maybe you have, instead of having every zip code in California, you just have a list of all of the zip codes you specifically work with a hundred zip code, whatever that's going to be. Um, and then you can always monitor those locations instead of scraping. How many ever this is, which I think is a few thousand.

Uh, I think we're still running the automation though, just to demonstrate kind of why I like doing this 100 percent rather than the guess and check is we're able to be really specific with finding all properties in this example, because we narrowed it down to every zip code. We could do cities. Like I said, um, you're probably going to have a couple of myths there.

Uh, but cities is definitely another very doable option. Whatever the website is going to allow you to do, however, you can make it work with that website specifically. Okay. We're done now. And if we go to our Google sheet, we'll see that we got a bunch of new, not a bunch, I guess there weren't that many properties in those zip codes.

Um, but we got all of the new properties. So now what we can do is we can go to our prop stream automation. Here and we can run this. So I'm going to make this start from row two and only do three rows at a time. What this is doing is it's going to go to prop stream, search for my email, sorry, not search for my email, type in my email and password login.

Since prop stream tends to log me out a lot. Then we go through the login process. Um, you probably saw earlier in my video, when I logged into prop stream, it said, you've been logged in a more than one location, click proceed or whatever. Uh, that's this. So this step is allow error. Then we type in the address, click on it, wait just a second.

We have to click on it again. This is just how you use prop stream. And then we are scraping that information before updating our Google sheet. I only have it updating one of the values right now, just because I was kind of testing this and I think I'm going to make. All of the data gets scraped from PropStream instead of Zillow, just because there's more.