Automating the BaT hunt? (Messing with scrapers)

[Sacasajr]

Hi everyone,

 

I’ve been lurking here for a while as I’ve been researching getting into a Seven (specifically keeping an eye out for an SV chassis since I’m on the taller side).

 

I've been monitoring the Seven category on Bring a Trailer but it's always a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s a pristine Caterham 420R, sometimes it’s a project Locost that needs a total resort. Trying to keep track of the actual sold prices to figure out a realistic budget was getting tedious, especially with how often they pop up randomly.

 

I’ve been reading up on automation lately and decided to see if I could combine that with my car search. I found a platform called Apify that hosts a bunch of different web scrapers, and I managed to find one running specifically for BaT.

 

It was actually pretty interesting. Instead of manually refreshing pages, I just set it to scrape the "Lotus Seven" and "Caterham" search results. It gave me a clean export of: winning bids, comments, and locations (trying not to rack up shipping costs).

 

Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out: https://apify.com/parseforge/bringatrailer-auctions-scraper

 

I’m still pretty new to the whole scraping/automation world, so I’m just testing the waters, but I've found it sooo interesting. Has anyone else here used tools like this to track values or find parts?

 

Any tips on how to refine this or other tools you've used would be appreciated!

 

Thanks!!

[Vovchandr]

We have a scraper bot already @Croc

 

Hints to refine the tool is one discussion

 

If you're just looking for a good Duratec SV I'd have a budget of around $40k and it goes +/- from there depending how many others want that similar color/spec, location, registration docs etc at the same time. 

 

Full range would likely be about $35k to $45k+, likely going more towards $45k due to 420R spec being closer to top of the range. 

[Sacasajr]

17 hours ago, Vovchandr said:

We have a scraper bot already @Croc

 

Hints to refine the tool is one discussion

 

If you're just looking for a good Duratec SV I'd have a budget of around $40k and it goes +/- from there depending how many others want that similar color/spec, location, registration docs etc at the same time. 

 

Full range would likely be about $35k to $45k+, likely going more towards $45k due to 420R spec being closer to top of the range. 

Oh that is awesome, I had no idea there was already a bot running here. I figured you guys might be ahead of the curve on that stuff.

 

Is it something that pulls into a public database/thread, or is it an internal tool? I'll check out the discussion.

 

And I really appreciate the numbers on the Duratec SV. That $40k mark aligns with the data I was pulling, but the spreadsheet definitely doesn’t capture the 'registration docs' headache. I have read enough stories about SB100/titling to know that a clean title is probably worth its weight in gold compared to a cheaper track-only car.

 

Thanks for the help!

[JohnCh]

1 hour ago, Sacasajr said:

And I really appreciate the numbers on the Duratec SV. That $40k mark aligns with the data I was pulling, but the spreadsheet definitely doesn’t capture the 'registration docs' headache. I have read enough stories about SB100/titling to know that a clean title is probably worth its weight in gold compared to a cheaper track-only car.

 

Other than an SV, what are you looking for? Is the car intended exclusively for track use or will it also see registered road use? Will you import it to Honduras, or do you have a place in the US?

[Croc]

2 hours ago, Sacasajr said:

Is it something that pulls into a public database/thread, or is it an internal tool? I'll check out the discussion.

 

 

No need to complicate thinking on data.  Good free to access reference points are here:

 

https://bringatrailer.com/caterham/seven/

 

or 

 

https://bringatrailer.com/lotus/seven-caterham-seven/

 

 

There are enough sales at bringatrailer to make a statistical sample and extrapolate predictions from.