Redfin's Terms of Use forbid automated crawling or querying of its services by any means, unless Redfin gives prior written permission. The listing data belongs to the MLS that supplies it, and Redfin's terms say it is for personal, non-commercial use. For market data, Redfin publishes 14 data sets as free downloads. A proxy changes the address of a request, not what the terms allow.
What Redfin's terms say
Redfin's Terms of Use were updated on 29 September 2025. Five of their rules bear on scrapers:
| section | in Redfin's words |
|---|---|
| 2.3.5, No Scrubbing or Scraping | "You may not automatedly crawl or query the Services for any purpose or by any means", including "screen and database scraping, spiders, robots, crawlers", without "prior express written permission". |
| 2.9.1 | "Any information you obtain from the Redfin website is intended for your personal, non-commercial use." |
| 2.9.3 | No copying or redistributing, "except in connection with your consideration of the purchase or sale of an individual property". |
| 2.9.4 | The ban on passing information on names scraping, "including screen and database scraping", and "data mining". |
| 2.9.5 | The individual MLS "that supplies the listing data is the owner of such data". |
To show pictures and prices of sold homes, Redfin's MLS data providers require you to acknowledge Redfin as your real estate agent. The terms page then lists 450 MLS sources, each with its own notice.
What robots.txt says
Redfin's robots.txt has a group for every crawler. It closes /stingray/, the path of the site's internal endpoints, but opens one feed of newest listings under it. It also closes /api/v1/rentals/ and /api/v1/properties/. One scraping tool's crawler, FireCrawlAgent, gets a group of its own that closes the whole site.
What Redfin publishes for free
Redfin's Data Center offers "Downloadable housing market insights from across the U.S." We counted 14 data sets on the page:
| updated | data sets |
|---|---|
| weekly and monthly | the Housing Market Tracker |
| monthly | buyers and sellers balance, luxury homes, price drops, purchase cancellations, delistings and relistings, the Redfin Home Price Index, existing home sales, financing, property types |
| quarterly | investor purchases, starter homes, migration, affordability |
What redfin.com did when our server asked
We sent plain requests to redfin.com from our server in St. Louis on 5 October 2026:
| address | what came back |
|---|---|
| Terms of Use | the page |
| robots.txt | the file |
| Data Center | the page |
| home page | HTTP 405, a page titled "Human Verification" |
| New York city page | HTTP 405, a page titled "Human Verification" |
We did not sign in, open a listing, download a data set or run a scraper.
What scraping guides say
Scraping guides say Redfin has no public API. Several send readers to its internal endpoints under /stingray/. That is the path robots.txt closes to every crawler. One proxy seller writes that scraping Redfin is legal but against its terms. It then argues that terms you never click to accept cannot be enforced. It cites no case, and sold prices sit behind an acknowledgment you do accept.
Where a proxy fits
For Redfin, a proxy does not fit. The terms forbid automated querying from any address, and section 2.9.4 names scraping and data mining. The listings belong to the MLS that supplied them. For market trends, the Data Center is free. To use listing data in a product, the owners to ask are Redfin and the MLS.
For other work where a proxy is allowed, what a residential proxy is explains the type. How to check if a proxy is working shows how to test one. Residential traffic without city targeting starts at $0.44/GB, and every plan is on our pricing page.
The limits of this page
We read Redfin's terms, robots.txt and Data Center from our server in St. Louis on 5 October 2026. We did not open the data files, so we do not describe their columns or regions. We do not know how Redfin decides who gets the Human Verification page. We found no Redfin page on written permission for scrapers. This page gives no legal opinion and is due for a check by 5 January 2027.
Sources
Every page below was read on 5 October 2026, from our server in St. Louis.
- Redfin, Terms of Use, updated 29 September 2025, sections 2.3 and 2.9.
- Redfin, the robots.txt file of redfin.com.
- Redfin, Data Center.
- Our requests to redfin.com from our server in St. Louis.
