Building a Telegram Notifier for Rental Listings

July 2025

It started as a casual observation from friends: the best rental deals disappear fast. You message a landlord minutes after the listing goes up—or you don’t get a reply at all. That tiny time window was frustrating, but it also sounded like a great problem for automation.

The idea was simple: scan rental sites, look for new listings that match your filters, and shoot a Telegram message as soon as something pops up. I called it a "notifier" but it became more like a radar.

The code lives here: telegram-notifier on GitHub.

I used requests and BeautifulSoup to scrape listings from the target site. For now, it's tuned to work with a specific Polish housing portal. Listings there have a consistent structure and pagination, which makes scraping straightforward once you know what you’re looking for. I parsed titles, prices, locations, and links, filtering based on keywords like "2 pokoje" or "garaż w cenie."

Every 60 seconds, the script polls the site. It keeps track of previously seen URLs in a local JSON file. If something new appears, it sends a formatted message through a Telegram bot to a private chat.

The most interesting part wasn’t the scraper or even the Telegram integration (that’s just a bot token and an HTTP POST away). What made it effective was the ultra-low latency. You get notified within seconds of a listing going live. And if you’re fast to message the landlord, you get first dibs. It worked. My friends actually found flats through this.

There’s room to evolve it—add database support, scheduling, deduplication heuristics, maybe even image-based filtering—but for now, it's a tool that works. Built for one purpose. Does its job. And maybe helps people find homes a little faster.