Houzz Mobile Proxies for Pro Directory, Ads and Marketplace Checks

Houzz is three things in one: an enormous photo library homeowners browse for ideas, a directory of designers, architects and contractors arranged by city, and a marketplace that sells furniture and fixtures with shipping and tax figured from the visitor's location. Pros pay for Houzz Pro software and for ads that place their profile at the top of local directory pages. Every one of those surfaces reads the visitor's location first. A designer in Los Angeles who wants to know what a Los Angeles homeowner sees needs a Los Angeles address on a phone network. That is what a Dedicated Mobile Proxies modem is, and it carries only your traffic.

The directory is a set of city pages

Houzz's pro directory is built as pages per category per city: kitchen designers in Chicago, landscape architects in Phoenix. The visitor's location picks the default page, and the top of each page is sold to pros who buy local ads. Below the ads, order depends on reviews, profile completeness and activity. For a pro the question is where their card sits on the page a local homeowner lands on, and the only reliable way to answer it is to load that page from inside the city.

Our modems hold AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon SIMs in eight US metros, and the carrier address resolves to the metro. Houzz fills in that city, the directory page is the local one, and the ad slots are the ones sold for that market. A reading from a data centre address lands somewhere else, often in a different state, and tells you about a page your customers never see.

Watching your profile and reviews

Your Houzz profile carries projects, photos, the description and the service area; Houzz adds reviews, badges and the position. Monitoring means loading your category pages from the metro modem each day and recording the position, which pros hold the ad slots above you, and your review count and rating. Keep the modem's address fixed so the series is comparable. Rotation is available on every plan but it is the wrong tool for this job.

Houzz reviews are written by clients on their own accounts and the platform removes ones it finds suspicious. The modem gives you a clean view of the count; it does not and should not produce reviews. Agencies managing profiles for several pros, with permission, can run the same routine per pro, each on its own modem if the pros are unrelated.

Ad placement QA

Houzz Pro ads are bought for a set of metros and categories. Confirming the ads run where you paid for them is a matter of loading each category page in each metro and checking whether your profile holds a slot. Do this from a modem in the metro and the slot you see is the slot a local sees. Do it for competitors too, since who is buying which slots is public to anyone standing in the right place.

Ad slots change as budgets run down through the day, so take the reading at a fixed hour. Unlimited data means the daily pull of a dozen image-heavy pages is not something you have to budget for.

Marketplace prices, shipping and tax

The Houzz shop computes shipping and sales tax from the visitor's location and sometimes shows regional stock. A brand selling through Houzz, or a designer sourcing for a client in another city, can read the final price a buyer in that metro sees by loading the product from a modem there. Add to cart, read the totals, and stop before paying. Doing that from the eight metros in turn gives a map of the delivered price across the country.

Houzz Pro and the account itself

Houzz Pro is a working tool with invoices, client messages and payment details, and like any such tool it notices logins from new networks. Keeping the login on your modem gives it one origin: one carrier, one city, an address held as long as the carrier keeps it. Nobody else is on the modem, so nothing changes under you. Monthly plans are $69 on 4G and $79 on 5G; a two-hour test at $2 or $3 lets you confirm the city reading first.

Setting up a Houzz proxy on Dedicated Mobile Proxies

1. Order a modem in the metro of the directory pages you care about.
2. Point a browser profile at the modem and confirm Houzz picks the right city.
3. Load your category pages and record position, ad slots and reviews.
4. Check marketplace totals from the metro, stopping before checkout.
5. Sign in to Houzz Pro from the same profile and keep the address fixed.

Houzz proxy questions