Kevin Farnham, July 1st, 2008 Comments(1)

PeekaCity recently announced that they have added Google Street View to their local information platform. PeekaCity is used primarily by real estate agents as a service to their customers (currently in Chicago and Dallas/Fort Worth). The addition of Street View enables customers to view street level photos of properties, and virtually drive up and down the streets in the neighborhood.

PeekaCity offers its platform to real estate agents through the PeekaCity API, which enables agents to embed local amenity information into Google maps for display on their web sites. People who are considering purchasing a specific property can view the locations of nearby banks, coffee shops, daycare centers, pharmacies, grocery stores, hospitals and much more. The API provides capability for creating PDF maps and reports that can be printed or downloaded by visitors to the site.

See our Peekacity profile for an introduction to the API. For more detail, view the PeekaCity API Developer’s Guide and the PeekaCityWS Web Service operations page. The PeekaCity API is free for up to 1000 daily queries. In addition to the Google mapping integration, the API integrates their LEAP real estate system designed to provide a virtual property viewing platform for real estate customers.

The API supports both SOAP and REST protocols with data returned in XML. The WSDL is publicly available. Available methods include GetHTMLContent, which returns the HTML for a particular property location, and NeighborhoodReport, which returns neighborhood information for a given location.

As with yesterday’s story on the Voice.com API, here’s another service that both provides an API but also consumes APIs. In this case Peekacity builds on Google Maps and with Voices.com they use Amazon’s infrastructure APIs. As the ecosystem of APIs grows it’s also becoming more complex as API stacks continue to grow ever higher in the cloud.