How I scraped real estate leads from Facebook Groups and built a working dashboard in a weekend

So last weekend, I had this idea — what if I could automate real estate lead generation without paying for ads or using sketchy scraping hacks?

I started looking into Facebook Groups because that’s where a lot of local real estate listings actually get posted — way before they hit marketplaces. But manually checking groups every day? Nah.

So I built a Facebook Group Scraper.

I gave it a few active real estate group URLs in my city, like:

```
https://web.facebook.com/groups/addisrealestate/

```

Then I configured it to:

1. Pull the 100 most recent posts

2. Sort them chronologically

3. Filter for only posts within the past 7 days

💥 Within minutes I had JSON data with:

• The full post message

• Reactions, comments, shares

• Author details (name + profile link)

• Post date & group name

• All attached images

Here's an example post it grabbed:

{
  "message": "🏠 3BR Apartment in Bole, newly renovated, $850/month. DM for photos!",
  "post_url": "facebook.com/groups/...",
  "reactions": { "total": 72, "like": 54, "love": 18 },
  "comments_count": 34,
  "author": { "name": "Selam T." },
  "creation_time": "2024-06-29T14:22:12Z"
}

After that, I dumped the data into a basic dashboard I spun up with Next.js + Chart.js + Tailwind. The dashboard lets me:

• Search listings by keyword (e.g. “Bole” or “villa”)

• Sort by engagement (to find high-interest posts)

• View trends over time

• Export leads as CSV

Result? In 3 days I had a working real estate intelligence dashboard powered entirely by public Facebook group data.

If you are interested in the tool, I have published it here:
👉 Facebook Group Scraper

Let me know if you'd use this in your niche or what features you'd want to see added! 🙌