Pennsylvania Brokers List & Python Scrapper to Do It Yourself

I’ve been working on learning Python to supplement my search work and I thought I’d share version 0.1 of the first tool I created: The BizBuySell and Broker State Contact Builder. I created a CSV of brokers from Pennsylvania as a test case and the downloadable list is below. It’s not the most well-written code and could use some refactoring for beauty, but I did want to share it now in case it would help with someone else’s search! By the numbers it had a… - 97% success rate of pulling broker name and phone number - 81% success rate of pulling the broker’s website (I have a fix I’m working on to get that to 90%) - 57% success rate going to the broker’s website and pulling the email address (I have a fix that will make this 77% effective quickly)

A few words of warning: 1. This tool pulls the first contact email address that the broker displays in their profile or on their website. That is often the most generic information and may need to be modified for personalization (e.g., the email address might be something like redacted not redacted 2. There are many brokers that work for the same brokerage firm, so be careful not to message everyone in the firm. Be targeted in your outreach. 3. The tool doesn’t standardize people’s names. So, there will be some names with distinctions after them (e.g., “John McClane, Esq.) that could throw off automation in your CRM of choice. 4. The Python tool is slow since there’s a lot of error-handling on the broker’s websites. Just give it time if you’re going through a big directory.

Message me if you want the Python code (I can’t upload it here) or post your email in the comments and I will send it to you.

Also, I went through the outputs from the code to find errors and cleaned up the list along the way, so I now have a list of 199 PA brokers. Here is the list if you just want to download that and not bother with the Python: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1itYrEs5_2f6vhnDiZkskBQuULsJup8Jh/view?usp=sharing

PS – Would love to chat with other Python folks on some interesting problems I ran into!