Proxy tier benchmark › Targets
Why does the NC Real Estate Commission licensee search return an empty page?
Professional licensing boards · minimum viable tier: no tier sufficient · measured 2026-08-18
Because it is being soft-blocked, and no tier tested got past it. The North Carolina Real Estate Commission licensee search scored 0% on all six configurations across 60 requests. Fifty of those requests returned HTTP 202 with a zero-length body; the remaining ten, all on the residential arm, returned HTTP 404 with a reCAPTCHA page. Measured 2026-08-18.
What was measured
| URL | https://www.ncrec.gov/Licensee/Search |
| Content assertion | Real Estate — never verified against a live page |
| Arms | 6 |
| Rounds per arm | 10 |
| Requests | 60 |
| Measured | 2026-08-18, 15:38–18:09 UTC |
| Benchmark host | DigitalOcean droplet, New York (nyc3) |
A request counts as a success only if the expected content is present. An HTTP 200 carrying a challenge page, an empty body or the wrong page is a failure, because it is not a page you can use.
This measures whether a tier works, not long-run stability under sustained load. Ten requests per arm, at a two-second floor, never approach a per-IP rate limit — which is the thing a rotating pool exists to defeat.
Results by arm
| Arm | Success | p50 | p95 | Bytes per success | Outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| direct (no proxy) | 0% | 125 ms | 146 ms | n/a | soft block 10 |
| datacenter, one pinned exit | 0% | 509 ms | 2,560 ms | n/a | soft block 10 |
| datacenter, rotating exit | 0% | 1,094 ms | 2,254 ms | n/a | soft block 10 |
| anti-detect, one pinned exit | 0% | 940 ms | 2,282 ms | n/a | soft block 10 |
| anti-detect, rotating exit | 0% | 541 ms | 1,049 ms | n/a | soft block 10 |
| residential, rotating exit | 0% | 2,106 ms | 5,320 ms | n/a | challenge 9, server error 1 |
What protects this target
Two different defences, chosen by exit type, on the same URL in the same three-hour window.
Unproxied, datacenter and anti-detect requests — fifty of them — all received HTTP 202 Accepted with zero bytes of body, in a median of 125 ms unproxied. Nothing is refused and nothing is served. There is no status code to catch, no error to log and no content to parse; a scraper that checks for a 2xx will record fifty successes and write fifty empty rows. The harness classifies an empty 2xx body as a soft block for exactly this reason, before the content assertion is ever evaluated.
The residential arm got a different answer entirely: HTTP 404 carrying a
34,196-byte reCAPTCHA page. Same URL, same run, and the site chose its defence
by the network the request came from. DIMENSIONS.md records the complementary
observation from compliance gating — ncrec.gov served its robots.txt to a US
datacenter IP and returned 403 to a European residential IP.
Nothing on this page describes a way through either defence. A reCAPTCHA cannot be solved by an HTTP client at any tier or price.
robots.txt status
The URL measured is allowed by the host's robots.txt.
| Status | allowed |
| File | https://www.ncrec.gov/robots.txt |
| Crawl-delay | not declared |
| Fetched as | the benchmark's own User-Agent |
| Note | robots.txt 0 bytes via benchmark_ua |
Limits of this result
- The content assertion for this target was never verified against a live page, because the reconnaissance probe was soft-blocked too. That does not affect the result: an empty body and a reCAPTCHA are both classified before the assertion runs.
- Ten rounds per arm in a single three-hour window on 2026-08-18. Anti-bot behaviour drifts; a result older than a few months is a historical record, not a current one.
- One exit geography. Every request left from a US datacenter host or a US exit, so nothing here describes how this target answers traffic from elsewhere.
- The unproxied arm ran from a clean, previously unused cloud IP with no accumulated reputation. It is a best case a production scraper will not sustain.
Related
- Public records scraping
- Does the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners site need a proxy?
- Does the Arizona Department of Real Estate site block datacenter proxies?
- Does the California DCA licence search need a proxy?
- Proxy tier benchmark: full report
Run date: 2026-08-18 · Full benchmark report · Harness and raw data · All 32 targets
The 60 rows behind this page are in results/six-arm/raw.csv; filter them with grep '^[^,]*,us_nc_realestate,' raw.csv.
Test your own target
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