How I used MCP to compare apartment rent and fees in Austin

One Austin apartment showed $1,302 in base rent and a $1,406.62 monthly leasing price. Over its 14-month term, that's $1,464.68 beyond base rent. Utilities still need their own budget.

I opened Zoey's listing for apartment #1-1501 to see what an AI-assisted comparison could actually tell me. At 2Captcha, I used our MCP to read the listing, then checked the figures in the browser. I'd seen the kitchen renderings. Time to look at the bill 🙂

All prices and availability below were checked on October 12, 2026.

Two prices, one apartment

Zoey #1-1501 was a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment with 720 square feet, listed as available now. The $1,302 base rent applied to a 14-month lease. The same page displayed $1,406.62 as its Total Monthly Leasing Price.

I passed the unit URL to scrape_page. MCP returned both figures, the lease term and the apartment number. I opened the page myself and found the same values.

The property's definition includes base rent, mandatory monthly fees and any user-selected optional fees. Variable charges and move-in or move-out costs are excluded. I kept that definition alongside the price. A column labelled "rent" would've left too much room for interpretation.

For an October 12 move-in date, the browser also showed estimated application costs of $250 and estimated move-in costs of $1,487.68. I recorded those separately. They aren't another recurring monthly charge.

What's inside the monthly total

For an itemized example, I opened apartment #3083 at The Asher. It has two bedrooms, so I wasn't treating it as an equivalent alternative to the Zoey one-bedroom. Its fee breakdown was useful, though.

For a 12-month lease, the page showed $2,065 in base rent and a $2,130 monthly total. The $65 difference consisted of $5 for pest control, $35 for trash and $25 for parking required on this floor plan.

I asked parse_marketplace for the apartment number, base rent, monthly total, lease term and fees as separate fields. In that extraction, MCP returned 3083, 2065, 2130 and 12 months, along with the mandatory fee rows. I checked them against the browser calculator.

That gave me a monthly figure of $2,130. Adding the $65 again would've counted the same charges twice. Application fees and potential deposits belong in separate columns.

The offer I kept for a closer look

I kept Zoey #1-1501 for the next round of research, using $1,406.62 as the monthly leasing figure for its 14-month term. Its application and move-in estimates stayed separate, with utilities and deposit conditions still to confirm.

The site advertised up to six weeks of free base rent on selected apartments. I hadn't confirmed that #1-1501 qualified, so I left that concession out of my calculation. "Up to" has plenty of room to do work in a leasing ad.

I've got a specific question ready for the leasing office: "Can you confirm the full pricing for #1-1501 on a 14-month lease, and whether this apartment qualifies for the promotion?" The monthly figure I'll check against their answer is $1,406.62 before variable charges.

Sources
2Captcha MCP: https://2captcha.com/ai/web-mcp
Zoey #1-1501: https://livezoey.com/floorplans/unit-d6a23624f857e627f54d8f2a86382f57/
The Asher #3083: https://www.theasheraustin.com/floorplans/b1/3083/
The Asher calculator: https://www.theasheraustin.com/floorplans/b1/3083/calculator/

Comments

[SRKDAN]

Keeping the definition of rent next to the number is a good habit, since base rent versus total monthly price is where these comparisons usually go wrong. Checking the scraped values against the browser is also worth doing every time. Did the scrape_page output ever differ from what the page showed, for example when fees were loaded after the first render?