Liwango: Powering vacation rental intelligence with Smart Proxy Manager

Liwango gives tourist authorities, hoteliers and property owners a forensic picture of trends in the short-term vacation rental market.

To monitor property pricing and occupation trends over time, Liwango can now extract essential web data more reliably with help from Zyte’s Smart Proxy Manager.

Launched in 2017, Liwango gathers valuable intelligence on the dynamic short-term property rental market. It shares this information commercially with tourist authorities, hoteliers, property managers, letting agencies, real estate vendors, town planners and other interested parties.

Data gathered by Liwango – including rental pricing, occupation rates, average stay length, customer reviews and other key indicators – is analyzed and delivered via a dedicated application, dashboards and APIs that provide a powerful barometer of rental market activity.

This intelligence helps Liwango’s clients better understand market trends on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis, helping them to optimize their revenue management strategies accordingly.

Liwango’s objective is to provide its B2B clients with timely, reliable information about the French short-term property rental market. To achieve this, Liwango regularly scrapes public-domain data from rental websites, including online marketplaces and aggregators.

To maximise the appeal of its own commercial offering, Liwango needs to ensure it can extract data reliably and at scale, while minimizing the risk of encountering technical obstructions.

For Liwango, understanding trends in the fast-moving vacation rental market depends on accessing large amounts of accurate, up-to-date information from rental providers.

“You can theoretically get hold of that data manually, but it’s really time-consuming on the scale we are operating and impossible in practice,” says Liwango CEO Aurélien Jemma. “As our business grew we wanted an easy-to-use automated tool to help us get the information we needed from other property rental websites in a quick and easy way.”

A specific challenge for Liwango is extracting data rapidly, reliably and at scale from frequently-visited websites that may have antibot measures implemented.

This can be a particular problem with online property rental platforms that frequently block legitimate attempts by third parties to extract large volumes of data.

To address the challenge of being blocked by over-zealous websites, Liwango approached Zyte to provide a reliable web scraping proxy solution, allowing them to spend less time on laborious manual configuration and management of proxies.

Zyte Smart Proxy Manager is the world's preeminent rotating proxy network. Automatically handling retries and by intelligently applying proxy rotation and fingerprinting logic, Smart Proxy Manager helps Liwango maximise data extraction success rates to 99.9%. “It saves us one or two days of valuable developer time every month” notes Aurélien, “not having to deal with monitoring requests, proxy rotation and so on.”

For Liwango, Smart Proxy Manager offered the strong appeal of providing a developer-friendly rotating proxy solution that’s highly cost-effective and uniquely easy to use – freeing up the busy Liwango tech team to focus on its core data extraction mission rather than juggling proxies.

While Liwango’s previous proxy management solution required the installation and maintenance of dedicated software on its servers, implementing Smart Proxy Manager has made life simpler:

“Within two minutes we were able to activate the proxies, and it’s done”, confirms Liwango CTO Guillaume Terrain. “It’s great not having to spend a lot of time configuring and managing IP addresses any more. Everything works transparently - all we need to do on our side is monitor the quotas.”

“Smart Proxy Manager has also supported our growth” adds Aurélien. “Scaling from scraping a few French regions to the whole territory was very easy. You just add more parallel requests, and that's pretty much it!”

With help from Zyte’s Smart Proxy Manager, Liwango is able to accurately monitor pricing and occupation trends in the fast-moving French vacation rental market – and deliver high-value data and insights to its own clients.