Category Archives: API’s

As you all know, graphics adds glitter to any web site. I have shown in my previous post how you can use FusionCharts to create cool Mortgage Charts using the Zillow Mortgage API. In this post, I will show couple of free software you can use to light up your web site. FancyBox FancyBox is a tool for displaying images, html content and multi-media in a Mac-style “lightbox” that floats over top of web page. It is built using the jQuery library and is a … Read More »

In August, CyberHomes stopped offering their home valuation API services. I liked their APIs, especially the comparable sales and neighborhood info which were very useful to create visual charts and were used for analysis by many folks. In retrospect, I should have known this from their lack of direction in this area; I always consider that a well maintained support forum is a good indication of a healthy API program as evident from the Zillow API support Forum. My work was featured on Cyberhomes blog (now taken off line) … Read More »

There are real estate sites like Zillow, eppraisal and Trulia giving away information like the following via APIs: Mortgage rates (for all the states and national average) Various statistical info like history of home prices for zip codes, neighborhoods and states. If you do not want to use the widgets provided by these sites and would like to create cool, custom charts you may want to consider using Fusion Charts. Here is the mortgage rates comparison chart (obtained using Zillow API) shown using Fusion charts. … Read More »

Recently someone contacted me and inquired about pulling comparable sales info from Zillow, Trulia, Eppraisal, Yahoo and Cyberhomes. He also wanted to sort the details before storing it in excel for further analysis. If it works well, he wanted to package it and sell to the realtor community. I told him that storing comparable sales data (or any other data for that matter) is against their Terms and conditions. Most of these providers (except Zillow and Eppraisal) do not provide APIs to get comparable sales. … Read More »

I’m really happy to say that the version 3 beta of the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin is finally available for everyone to try out. For those who don’t know what Local Market Explorer is, it’s a way to embed local area info from Zillow, Education.com, Walk Score, Yelp, TeachStreet, and Nile Guide directly into your WordPress-powered site in order to benefit your visitors and give search engines more content. You can see a demo of Local Market Explorer v3 on Geek Estate and on BankVibe’s … Read More »

The final release of version 2 of the Local Market Explorer WordPress Plugin is still a week or so away, but for the adventurous, we’re making available a beta version to try out. I feel pretty confident that there aren’t major bugs though, so you should be perfectly safe with the upgrade (if you’re currently using version 1) or install. The BIG change in v2 is that the plugin now supports loading data on both neighborhood AND zip code level. To see an example, take … Read More »

If you’re interested in learning more about the Onboard Listings API I mentioned on Geek Estate in January (and again in March), there are two recent posts from the Onboard Blog worth reading: General Update Listings API FAQ They’ve announced two early partners – ListingPress & Z57. I haven’t seen an example implementation from Z57 as of yet, but have seen an early DEMO from ListingPress and was thoroughly impressed. Once there is an example implementation I can point to, I will.

Today’s post is my first contribution to the Geek Estate Blog, but before I dive into the details of today’s post, I wanted to take a quick second to do an intro about my background in the online world. My name is Matthew Swanson and I’ve been in the online world right about 10 years now. I started as a web developer at Headhunter.net in March 2000 working with Shane Pike. Headhunter.net transitioned as we were bought by CareerBuilder in 2002 and I worked on … Read More »

There was a list of the Top Twenty Open APIs and Mashup Resources for Web Developers (which i Tweeted about yesterday) published two days ago that the web developers reading this blog might find useful. Not all the APIs mentioned are specific to real estate; in fact, I guess the Zillow API is the only one that is (full disclosure: I manage the Zillow API program) — but that’s not the point of this post. The point is that there are a ton of free APIs, … Read More »

If you are an agent, broker, or web developer in the New York City real estate market — there is a new real estate API from the New York Times that you may want to check out. Here are the four specific API calls that make up the Real Estate API: Listings Percentiles Listings Counts Sales Percentiles Sales Counts The APIs give you aggregate data for real estate listings and sales in the five boroughs of New York City. Listings data is from the NYT … Read More »