Introducing the HMO Data Scraper — v1.0.16
Introducing the HMO Data Scraper — v1.0.16
This post covers what shipped in v1.0.16 and what it means for HMOwatch users.
The Problem
HMO licensing data in the UK is split across more than 400 local authorities. Every council publishes its own register — or doesn't publish one at all — in whatever format it chooses. For letting agents and landlords trying to stay compliant, that means manually checking dozens of different council websites, spreadsheets, and PDFs on a regular basis. It's slow, error-prone, and impossible to do at scale.
What We Built
With v1.0.16, HMOwatch now deploys an automated scraper that:
- Finds every local authority HMO register across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland — both landlord registers and property registers.
- Extracts the data regardless of format: web pages, CSVs, Excel files, PDFs, or open data APIs.
- Keeps it continuously updated by re-polling each source on an ongoing schedule and detecting changes between cycles.
- Aggregates everything into one place so the rest of the application has a single, structured, always-current dataset to work from.
Why This Matters
This release is the data foundation that everything else in HMOwatch is built on. Without accurate, up-to-date register data, compliance alerts can't fire, property lookups can't be trusted, and landlord checks can't be verified.
By automating the entire collection and update pipeline, HMOwatch removes the need for any manual data maintenance. When a council adds a new licence, revokes an existing one, or publishes a new licensing scheme, the scraper picks it up automatically.
What's Next
With the data layer in place, upcoming releases will focus on surfacing that data through alerts, property search, and compliance reporting tools.
For technical details, see the HMO Data Scraper feature documentation.