I have a mortgage with Northern Rock, a UK bank which collapsed (triggering the first run on a UK bank) a couple of months after we got our mortgage. It’s a bit of a nightmare, and one of the (many) things that I lie in bed thinking about at 3am when I should be sleeping.
Northern Rock are splitting into two parts – one which will continue to trade as a normal bank and one which will hold all their crappy mortgages, but won’t be able to lend out any new money. They’re trying to get people to remortgage and move away from the ‘bad’ bank.
Obviously my mortgage is going to the ‘bad’ bank, and while their current standard variable rate (SVR) is about 2% less than the fixed rate we have at the moment, we expect this to rise rapidly over the coming months.
Our fixed rate ends in August 2012 and it’s probably not practical for us to move our mortgage elsewhere for several annoying reasons. As a result we’ll have to just suck up whatever Evil Northern Rock’s SVR is in 2012, and if it’s more than we can afford then we’ll lose the house.
So the SVR of Northern Rock Asset Management is suddenly of vital interest to me. Wouldn’t it be useful if I could somehow track this, perhaps by having Twitter tell me when it changes?
You can see where this is going, right?
Using the power of Nokogiri and SelectorGadget it’s really hugely easy to screen-scrape data off of a single page. A simple regex and application of the Twitter gem and now I’ve got a script that can be easily called from the crontab every night to see if the interest rate’s changed.
There’s actually a lot of people in the same situation as me, so maybe some others will find this useful. Even if it’s just me, it’ll let me know exactly how screwed I am and it was nice to play with screen-scraping and see how easy it was. (Easy, at least, until they change that page. The inevitable fail of screen-scraping.)
The Twitter account is NorthernRockSVR and I’ve put the code up as a gist on GitHub:
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