Zillow Frees Up Real Estate APIs

Popular real estate site Zillow is opening up its APIs - for free - enabling other sites to incorporate Zillow real estate data and functionality.

Real estate site Zillow.com announced today that it is releasing application programming interfaces (APIs) to developers free of charge, enabling other Internet sites to incorporate Zillow data and features in their own domains, offering detailed information from Zillow’s database of some 68 million U.S. homes.

“We understand that individuals in the real estate market today, whether it be buying or selling a home, engage with real estate professionals on a local level,” said Mark Eamer, Zillow’s director of online marketing. “While there are a handful of national real estate sites on the Web today, many thousands of local real estate agents and brokerages also have home pages, and many are looking for ways to enhance these with relevant, free information for their customers. By opening up the Zillow API, we’re putting more information in the hands of consumers, in more places.”

Zillow is initially offering two API sets: one plugs into the company’s hoe valuation estimates, while the other taps into property details. The valuation API includes Zillow’s own “Zestimate” values, valuation charges, comparable sales, and overal market trend charts. The property API accesses specific information about homes, including the number of beds and baths, historical sale information, and tax assessment data.

Earlier this year, Zillow added the capability to zoom into properties in selected areas using low-altitude aerial photos from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform; in July, it launched a means to obtain “Zestimates” of a property’s value via text messaging.