The complete code for this post is on GitHub.
Pricing data is sourced from domain.com.au which has records of property sales dating back to 1990. The “Sales History” table displays up to 20 records at a time.
Using curl we can get directly at the content of the table. There is a limit to how many records you can request per post, I’m not sure how many, I’m sticking with 20. (Thanks goes to my housemate, MT, for helping me figure this one out):
curl -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data" -X POST \
-F "locationType=Postcode" -F "state=ACT" \
-F "postcodeId=141" -F "id=141" \
-F "recordFrom=1" \
-F "recordTo=20" \
http://apm.domain.com.au/AJAX/Research/SalesHistory.aspx
This returns the html markup of the table of the 20 most recent recorded sales of properties with postcode 2602 (i.e. with postcodeId=141). Extracting the data from the html, we end up with the following data frame:
head(dat)
# Address NrBed NrBath PropType Price Date
# 1 157/50 Ellenborough St 3 2 Unit NA 2013-06-18
# 2 5 Faunce Cr 4 2 House 1130000 2013-06-15
# 3 33 Mackennal St 3 1 House 670000 2013-06-15
# 4 60 Clianthus St 3 1 House 698000 2013-06-15
# 5 3/6 Hay St 2 2 Unit NA 2013-06-14
# 6 18 Piper St 3 1 House NA 2013-06-13
The fields are:
(There was also the agent, but I’ve dumped that.)