John Musser, April 16th, 2008 Comments(8)

Despite the headlines about the ongoing housing crisis, there’s no shortage of new real estate-related APIs coming to market. We now have 7 real estate APIs in our directory, covering a range of services from real estate search, pricing, mortgage quotation services, and agent ratings. Here’s an overview of the APIs in this space:

Zillow: Perhaps the most well known real estate API, it exposes their popular services like “zestimates”, a form of algorithmic home estimates. It’s been used in a variety of mashups, 15 at last count. One of the early challenges Zillow had was an claim filed with the FTC about potentially misleading consumers with their valuations (a claim that ultimately wasn’t substantiated).
Rentometer: A real estate pricing service for rentals where “you can request information such as low, median, and high rental rates and comparable market data for a specific property or area.”
Trulia: This useful real estate search engine offers an API that’s been used to create at least 7 interesting mashups. The Trulia service itself offers lots of interesting real estate-related data and metrics.
Mortgage Marvel: A mortgage rates quote service that “enables your users to get the same mortgage rate comparisons available on Mortgage Marvel right on your site. Our API allows you to collect rate search parameters and present real-time, mortgage rate and fee quotes from multiple lenders.”
Nestoria: Nestoria is a vertical search engine for property in the UK and Spain. The site offers an API to their database of geocoded properties. Earlier we did a mashup case study with Nestoria founder Ed Freyfogle.
AgentRank API: Access to real estate agent sales, forecasts, and reviews from AgentRank.com system for ranking Realtors based on professional experience, recent home sales, endorsements from past clients, and other variables.” The API supports both SOAP and REST, although data in the database seems a little sparse at the moment.
Planning Alerts: A local UK service that “searches as many local authority planning websites as it can find and emails you details of applications near you. The aim of this to enable shared scrutiny of what is being built (and knocked down) in peoples communities.”

Certainly real estate mashups have been popular, there are 167 now, and last year we profiled the best of 78.

One of our most visited mashup profiles in this market is for PlotOrNot that uses the Trulia API to give you graphical answers to lots of interesting questions based on real estate pricing data.