# Idealista Proxies: 1,180 Words, No Browser

> Idealista.it through residential proxies, 28 September 2026: plain HTTP returns 1,180 words in 101,680 bytes, the rendered pass zero words. Skip the browser.

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# Idealista Proxies: 1,180 Words, No Browser

Use casesSep 28, 2026·8 min read·By [Aldo Morese](https://quanticdata.io/about/), founder of QuanticData

Words returned by idealista.it on 28 September 2026 by fetch mode: 1,180 words from 101,680 bytes over plain HTTP from Italy, 1,180 words from Spain, zero words from a 38.5-second rendered pass, and 10 listings in 5.5 seconds from one collector run

On this page [Plain HTTP reads 1,180 words; the browser reads nothing](/blog/idealista-proxies/#plain-http-reads-1-180-words-the-browser-reads-nothing) [The exit country does not change the page, so pin it for the session](/blog/idealista-proxies/#the-exit-country-does-not-change-the-page-so-pin-it-for-the) [What robots.txt opens, and where the official API lives](/blog/idealista-proxies/#what-robots-txt-opens-and-where-the-official-api-lives) [The collector returns ten Milan listings in 5.5 seconds](/blog/idealista-proxies/#the-collector-returns-ten-milan-listings-in-5-5-seconds) [Cost math with real numbers](/blog/idealista-proxies/#cost-math-with-real-numbers) [The setting that works on Idealista](/blog/idealista-proxies/#the-setting-that-works-on-idealista)

Idealista is the property portal that the scraping forums have given up on, and it is the clearest case in our whole measurement table of the browser being the wrong tool. On 28 September 2026 idealista.it answered a plain HTTP client with a browser TLS profile, through an Italian residential exit, with 200 OK, 101,680 bytes and 1,180 words: the full head, the h1, the canonical, the whole server-rendered home. The rendered pass, from the same exit, returned zero words after 38.5 seconds. The setting that works on Idealista is residential, plain HTTP, country=it, never render: the browser adds 35 seconds per page and nothing to parse. When you need listings rather than pages, the idealista_search collector returned 10 Milan sale listings with price, size, price per square metre and agency in 5.5 seconds.

## Plain HTTP reads 1,180 words; the browser reads nothing

Idealista serves its home fully rendered on the server, and a plain HTTP client with a real Chrome or Firefox TLS fingerprint gets all of it: the seo_audit tool in our [MCP server](https://quanticdata.io/mcp-server/) returned the title, the meta description, a self-referencing canonical, the h1 "Mi sembra piccola" and 1,180 words on the no-JS pass, in a single attempt, from Italy and again from Spain. The rendered pass from the same exit came back after 38.5 seconds with zero words. The plain client is the right client on this site, and it is ten times faster.

| Fetch (28 September 2026) | Status | Bytes returned | Time | Words | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| idealista.it, plain HTTP, Italian exit | 200 | 101,680 | 3.8 s | 1,180 | Title, description, canonical, h1; robots meta noodp; no JSON-LD |
| idealista.it, plain HTTP, Spanish exit | 200 | n/a | 11.1 s (audit) | 1,180 | Identical Italian page; no redirect to idealista.com |
| idealista.it, rendered pass, Italian exit | n/a | n/a | 38.5 s | 0 | Nothing to parse; skip the browser |
| idealista.it/robots.txt | 200 | 12,678 | 0.3 s | n/a | Served from a Fastly cache, 24-hour max-age |
| idealista.it/news/ | 200 | 239,826 | 4.7 s | 4,901 | The news section, a Drupal site, fully open over plain HTTP |

This inverts the rule most guides teach. On Idealista the more capable client is the one that gets less. A headless browser exposes canvas, WebGL and automation surfaces that a real visitor's browser does not present the same way; a plain client exposes a TLS handshake and headers, and those we make indistinguishable from a real browser. We measured the same pattern on 26 September, 1,159 words over plain HTTP against zero rendered, so it is stable across days. Do not render Idealista. It costs ten times the wait and returns nothing.

## The exit country does not change the page, so pin it for the session

Idealista runs three sites, idealista.com for Spain, idealista.it for Italy and idealista.pt for Portugal, and the country is in the domain. From a Spanish residential exit, idealista.it returned the same Italian title, the same h1 and the same 1,180 words with no redirect. The number that changes when you pick the wrong exit is zero. What the exit does change is how the site reads your session: IP reputation counts alongside the fingerprint, and a residential address in the market the site serves is the profile of its actual readers. Use country=it for idealista.it, country=es for idealista.com, and keep one exit country for the length of a job.

The Reddit thread that ranks first for "idealista scraper" asks what setup still works and answers itself in the top comment, which names the site's bot-protection vendor and its TLS, canvas and WebGL checks. The measurement above is the practical consequence of that answer. If the checks are on browser surfaces, do not bring a browser. Bring a residential exit and a client whose TLS handshake is a real browser's, and read the server-rendered HTML, which on this site is complete.

## What robots.txt opens, and where the official API lives

Idealista's robots.txt is 12,678 bytes and, unusually, it leaves pagination open: the line that would disallow /*/pagina- is present but commented out. What it closes is depth of filtering and ordering: any sale or rental URL with more than three comma-separated filters, every ?ordine= sort, the map-list view, /ajax/, /utente/, /preferiti/, the photo and virtual-tour sub-pages of a listing, and the per-language directories except a whitelist of search and landing paths in each of fifteen languages. A crawler that reads city and district listing pages, paginates them, and opens listings is inside the file; one that composes four filters or sorts by price is not.

Idealista also publishes an official API. The developer portal at developers.idealista.com exists, the autocomplete for "idealista api" is full of "pricing", "request", "free" and "python", and the portal's pages load only in a browser, so we read it as a person and not as a fetch. For a product that needs Idealista data at scale and on Idealista's terms, that access request is the route, and no proxy setting replaces it. For public-page research at a human pace, what follows is the cost.

## The collector returns ten Milan listings in 5.5 seconds

We ran the [Idealista collector](https://quanticdata.io/collectors/idealista-scraper-api/) once on 28 September 2026 with location milano-milano, site it, operation sale and max_results 10. It delivered 10 rows in 5.51 seconds. Each row carries the listing id, title with type and street or zone, listing URL, price as shown and as a number, price per square metre where the card shows it, size in square metres, the detail chips as shown, the agency, a description and the thumbnail.

| Field in the run | What came back for 10 rows |
| --- | --- |
| Price | 10 of 10, from 219,000 € for a 43 m² two-room flat to 1,750,000 € for a 300 m² detached house |
| Size | 10 of 10 in square metres, 43 to 300 |
| Price per m² | 6 of 10 shown on the card, from 2,571 €/m² in Affori to 7,700 €/m² near Solari |
| Agency | 10 of 10 named, six different agencies |
| Detail chips | Rooms, floor, lift, box or garage on every row, as Idealista states them |
| Zone | Affori, Barona, Istria, Soderini, Stadera, Bovisasca, Giambellino, Garegnano, San Vittore, Porta Vittoria |

At $0.001 per delivered listing the run cost one cent. Price per square metre is the field that turns a listing feed into a market index, and it is worth knowing that Idealista shows it on 6 cards out of 10; the collector returns it where shown and leaves it null where not, rather than computing a number the site did not state. The rooms count sits inside the detail chips ("3 locali") rather than a separate field, which is where a parser should read it.

## Cost math with real numbers

Prices from our [pricing page](https://quanticdata.io/pricing/): residential Basic $0.80/GB, Premium $2.20/GB, the [web scraping API](https://quanticdata.io/web-scraping-api/) from $0.0002 per page and the Idealista collector at $0.001 per delivered listing. One gigabyte is counted as 10^9 bytes.

| Approach | Bytes per page | Pages per GB | Cost per 1,000 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Plain HTTP over residential Basic ($0.80/GB) | 101,680 | about 9,835 | about $0.08 per 1,000 pages |
| Plain HTTP over residential Premium ($2.20/GB) | 101,680 | about 9,835 | about $0.22 per 1,000 pages |
| Rendered over residential | n/a | n/a | Zero words delivered, 38.5 seconds per page, nothing to price |
| Web scraping API, plain HTTP | n/a | n/a | $0.20 per 1,000 pages |
| idealista_search collector | n/a | n/a | $1.00 per 1,000 listings, price, size, €/m² and agency parsed |

At 101,680 bytes for 1,180 words, Idealista's home is the best byte-per-word ratio in this family, about 86 bytes a word against 8,800 on [Vinted](https://quanticdata.io/blog/vinted-proxies/). Byte figures are decoded HTML; wire transfer after compression is lower (the compressed body was 18,463 bytes) and headers add a little back. The saving to point at is the row that reads "nothing delivered": every rendering minute spent on this site is a minute paid for zero words. For the German classifieds site where the fence is in robots.txt rather than in the fingerprint, see [Kleinanzeigen through residential proxies](https://quanticdata.io/blog/kleinanzeigen-proxies/).

## The setting that works on Idealista

- **Network**: [residential](https://quanticdata.io/residential-proxies/), Basic at $0.80/GB. A residential exit in the site's own market returned the full page on the first attempt from Italy and from Spain.

- **Fetch mode**: engine: tls, plain HTTP with a browser TLS profile, and never render. 1,180 words in 3.8 seconds; the rendered pass returns zero words in 38.5 seconds, so skipping the browser saves 35 seconds a page.

- **Country**: country=it for idealista.it. The page is the same from Spain (1,180 words, no redirect), so the exit is pinned so that IP reputation and session match the market, not for access.

- **When the proxy is not enough**: the [idealista_search collector](https://quanticdata.io/collectors/idealista-scraper-api/), 10 listings in 5.5 seconds with price, size, price per square metre and agency, $0.001 per delivered listing; for data on Idealista's own terms, the access request at its developer portal.

- Every account gets $2 of free API usage per month, and failed requests are never billed.

### Sources & further reading

- [idealista.it/robots.txt (fetched 28 September 2026)](https://www.idealista.it/robots.txt)

- [idealista/news, the open news section of idealista.it](https://www.idealista.it/news/)

- [idealista developer portal (API access request)](https://developers.idealista.com/)

- [Anyone successful scraping Idealista websites?, r/webscraping](https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/comments/1rb50m5/anyone_succesfull_scraping_idealista_websites/)

## FAQ

Quick answers on idealista proxies.

[Something else? Ask us →](mailto:hello@quanticdata.io)

### What proxies work for Idealista?

Residential exits in the market of the domain, used with a plain HTTP client that has a real browser TLS fingerprint. On 28 September 2026 that combination returned 200 OK, 101,680 bytes and 1,180 words from idealista.it on the first attempt from Italy and again from Spain. The network alone is not the answer; the fetch mode is.

### Can you scrape Idealista with a headless browser?

Not in our measurement. From the same Italian residential exit that returned 1,180 words over plain HTTP in 3.8 seconds, the rendered pass returned zero words after 38.5 seconds. A browser exposes canvas, WebGL and automation surfaces that a plain client never presents. Read the server-rendered HTML instead; it is complete.

### Does Idealista block based on country?

Not on the page itself: idealista.it returned the same 1,180-word Italian page from a Spanish exit as from an Italian one, with no redirect. Country still matters because the site weighs IP reputation, so pin the exit to the market of the domain, country=it for idealista.it, and keep it for the whole job.

### Is there an official Idealista API?

Yes. Idealista runs a developer portal at developers.idealista.com with an access-request process, and the autocomplete for "idealista api" is dominated by "pricing", "request" and "free". Its pages load only in a browser. For data at scale on Idealista own terms that request is the route; the collector covers public listing pages for research at $0.001 per delivered listing.

### Does Idealista robots.txt allow pagination?

Yes. In the 12,678-byte file the rule that would disallow /*/pagina- is commented out, so listing pages can be paged. What is disallowed is any search URL with more than three filters, every ?ordine= sort order, /ajax/, /utente/, /preferiti/ and the photo and virtual-tour sub-pages of a listing.

### How much does 1,000 Idealista pages cost through a proxy?

About $0.08 on residential Basic at $0.80/GB, because each home page is 101,680 bytes and one gigabyte, counted as 10^9 bytes, holds about 9,835 of them. The collector returns 1,000 parsed listings for $1.00, our 10-row Milan run took 5.51 seconds, and every account gets $2 of free API usage per month.

## Bring the fingerprint, not the browser

Every number here came from one platform: the seo_audit tool fetched idealista.it both ways and showed the plain client wins, and one collector run returned ten parsed Milan listings in 5.5 seconds. Every account gets $2 of free API usage per month, and failed requests are never billed.

[Start free — $2/month included](https://quanticdata.io/signup/)[Explore Residential Proxies from $0.80/GB](https://quanticdata.io/residential-proxies/)

## Related reading

[Use cases Subito Proxies: 600 Words for 183 KB Subito.it measured through residential exits on 28 September 2026. The home answers a plain HTTP client with 200 OK, 182,983 bytes and 600 words; rendering it costs 1,263,991 bytes and returns the same 600. The subito_search collector returns 10 ads in 2.7 seconds with price, comune, seller type and shipping cost, out of the 9,268 Subito reports for the query. Read →](https://quanticdata.io/blog/subito-proxies/) [Use cases Vinted Proxies: 227 Words in 2 MB of HTML Vinted measured through residential exits on 28 September 2026. The Italian home answers a plain HTTP client with 200 OK, 1,997,674 bytes and 227 words; the rendered page takes 36 seconds and returns 204 words. The country lives in the domain, not in the exit: from Germany, vinted.it is still Italian. And robots.txt says, in its own words, what bots may not do. Read →](https://quanticdata.io/blog/vinted-proxies/) [Use cases Zalando Proxies: 266 Words, One False 200 Zalando.it measured through residential exits on 28 September 2026. The home answers a plain HTTP client with 200 OK, 570,402 bytes and 266 words; rendered, 1,607,265 bytes and 268 words. The number that matters is the one status code that lies: Zalando can answer 200 with an Akamai interstitial instead of the catalogue, and the collector retried it from a fresh exit and delivered 10 products with EU Omnibus reference prices in 3.6 seconds. Read →](https://quanticdata.io/blog/zalando-proxies/)

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Source: https://quanticdata.io/blog/idealista-proxies/ · Site index for AI: https://quanticdata.io/llms.txt · Full dump: https://quanticdata.io/llms-full.txt