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 Javascript based solution.

Download fancybox, view the examples and start using it now. Check out the slide show of Home Valuation Charts created using Zillow APIs and FancyBox. See how easy it is to integrate YouTube videos using FancyBox.

Slide show using FancyBox

LightBox

Download lighbox code and follow the simple two step directions to add it to your web pages. You can also create slide shows as explained there. Even though easier to use, this is not as powerful as FancyBox. Check out my slide show of Home valuation charts created using Zillow APIs and LighBox.

Let me know if you have any feedback or run into any issues.

My work was featured on Cyberhomes blog (now taken off line) by their marketing VP who left Cyberhomes a year ago, and taking the fizzle out of the API program in the process. Hence the latest announcement was expected in some ways, I suppose? Check out the article LPS Real Estate Group agrees to sell Cyberhomes to Listingbook for more background information.

This raises a very important question – What are the options for the current users of CyberHomes API?

As mentioned on their web site in August, they suggested using LPS Real Estate Group. When I checked with them, they didn’t have any free API offering. They have very powerful options if you are willing to pay a handsome amount which may not be viable for small web sites. For those without large budgets to work with, you may want to consider using the only two players left providing valuation data free of charge – Zillow and Eppraisal. As of now, Trulia is not offering comparable sales and I am yet to check Eppraisal offerings. Check out my Zillow comparable sales mashup, which works pretty well. As a coin has two sides, there are folks who question the accuracy of Zillow data, which will always be debated but that’s another subject in itself.

Technically, migrating your code from using Cyberhomes API to use Zillow API should not be a huge deal since all provide similar data. Especially if the original code was written well following Object Oriented Programming techniques, this should not be a costly affair in my opinion.

Particularly for Cyberhomes API users who had to explore other options this fall, feel free to discuss your experience here so that others among the Geek Estate community can benefit.

• 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.

Mortgage Rate comparison Chart (US Vs CA)

View Code snippet for the above.

View more examples using Trulia API.

Check out their web site for free download of the software and for many good examples to get started with. If you want to use this on production sites or you do not like the ‘evaluation label’, you may want to purchase a license.

Note: FusionCharts helps you create animated & interactive charts for web applications. It can be used on PCs, iPads, iPhones and a majority of other mobile devices.

FusionCharts leverages Flash and JavaScript (HTML5) to create stunning charts, and works with both XML and JSON data. It can be integrated with any server-side technology (ASP, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Pearl, Ruby on Rails etc.) and database.

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. However, regardless, he found someone to do screen scraping these sites and create an excel spread sheet for a cheap price.

Screen scraping and stealing information from web sites has serious ramifications. This will create legal issues once the web site owners trace the activity to his IP address. His site also could be blacklisted. Even worse, screen scraping will stop functioning once the site makes minor changes to their HTML which is not uncommon in today’s world dominated by screen scrapers.

Screen scraping is simple parsing of web pages using a programming language (like PHP, Cold Fusion, Java, ASP, Perl, Python) looking for specific patterns in the HTML code extracting certain key details. This only requires basic programming skills and most of the languages make it easy with powerful parsing capabilities. This amounts to piracy and can have legal ramifications and is best avoided. The temptation is high given there are many freelancers over the internet offering cheap solutions using screen scraping.

This leads to the basic question – How can one access comparable sales information to attract traffic to his site?

The answer depends on your needs and capability. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty with the programming and/or you have low budget, your best bet will be using readily available widgets provided by most of these sites. You will only need some basic HTML skills to make sure the widget is placed properly on your web site without distorting the layout. There may also be plug-ins available (like the WordPress local market explorer) if you want to add these to your blog.

For advanced users with programming skills, you can try the API (Application programming Interface) offered by these providers. You can also hire programmers to do this for you. APIs are mostly Web services based on REST (Vs SOAP).  Amazon was the pioneer in this area later embraced by most major players. There are very good frameworks or libraries available for using these APIs. This gives you maximum flexibility and you can combine this with other APIs like Google maps, Facebook, Twitter, Walkscore and Yelp (to name a few) to create very interesting end results, known as mashups. Word of caution – make sure that you read and follow their Terms & Conditions when doing this.

API offerings may be very limited in many cases and you may end up using the widgets in these situations. One also has to be aware of the API changes which may break your code requiring fixes to keep it running; something Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook have done frequently. I’d recommend making sure you have an ongoing relationship with the programmer when you hire for this kind of  job. Don’t go only by the cost since most of them may not be around when your code needs fix.

Questions about APIs, widgets, or screen scraping? Ask away in the comments!

While the development of this plugin was funded by Zillow, all the different components in the plugin are now completely independent from each other and can be used as individual modules if desired. Version 3 is a complete rewrite of the plugin that brings with it a ton of features that had been requested on the Local Market Explorer feedback page as well as many bug fixes. Following are the big things that have changed.

• Performance has been significantly increased by making all of the external data requests in parallel instead of in series. This means that the modules that have slower APIs won’t slow down the page as much as they did in the past.
• The modules can now be used on individual pages and posts instead of only on the Local Market Explorer virtual pages. This adds a great deal of flexibility for embedding this valuable data into your pages. Here’s an example of the market stats module for Los Angeles loaded into a random page. This functionality is implemented via WordPress shortcodes and includes a handy toolbar icon in the page / post editor for inserting these shortcodes.
• The HTML markup and CSS styling has been significantly pruned so that skinning is easier and so that the default styles work better with many more themes.
• It’s now easier to use a custom page template for all LME pages.
• A real-time IDX real estate module has been added to all city and zip pages to display the newest listings in those areas. This only works if you also have the dsIDXpress WordPress IDX plugin (disclaimer: I work for Diverse Solutions, the company that sells dsIDXpress).
• The admin UI has been significantly enhanced to make it easier to use. A help section has also been added in the admin.
• A neighborhood module has been added on city pages that links to all the neighborhoods within that city. These neighborhood names are provided by Zillow’s GetRegionChildren API.
• Support for canonical link tags has been added so that search engines will better index the true URL and won’t see duplicate content within your domain.
• This version works way better with some of the more obscure WordPress installs as well as with WordPress 3.x.
• Support for XML sitemaps has been added via the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
• Lots of bugs have been fixed relating to data not displaying when it should (ex. homes for sale in certain areas) and blank data displaying when it shouldn’t (ex. Zillow Home Value Index showing $0 when Zillow doesn’t have that data).
• More charts and data have been added to a few of the modules.

The Local Market Explorer v3 beta can be downloaded as a zip file from here. After you’ve downloaded it, simply install it in your blog by uploading it through the plugin installer. If you have v2 installed, you’ll probably need to delete it first. Deleting v2 won’t delete your settings or area descriptions though; installing v3 will then use these settings / descriptions. Additionally, you should be able to downgrade to v2 if you really want to for some reason.

While this release is considered to be an open beta and hasn’t encountered any major issues during testing on a number of other blogs, you may want to consider back up your site before installing this to make sure nothing happens with your descriptions and settings if you already have v2 installed. You may want to consider WordPress Backup or WP-DB-Backup; I’ve personally never tried either. You’ll probably be safe without doing this, but it just never really hurts to double-check your backup system.

Anyway, I’m sure this will have bugs, so please discuss in the comments. If you have feature requests from here on out or encounter other bugs after v3 is released, please use the feedback page. The final release will be out soon!

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 a look at the Belltown neighborhood in Seattle, WA. The module was previously limited to just being able to display data on a city level. You can add your own descriptions (including HTML now) for each city, neighborhood, and zip code that you set up. You can still also link to cities, neighborhoods, and zips that you haven’t set up / added descriptions for.

Another great new feature is the addition of more market data in the “Market Statistics” module. Data such as the median list price, median sale price, median list price per sq ft, and the number of homes for sale has been added. More data will likely be available in the very near future.

Other changes include usability improvements in the admin area, the ability to turn the Flickr panel off independently of turning off the area descriptions, and the ability to turn off the “Schools” and “Market Statistics” modules.

Anyway, please give it a whirl. You can download the zip file here. If you don’t have Local Market Explorer installed at all, you should be able to simply download the plugin and install it via the plugin upload area in your admin. If you already have Local Market Explorer installed, you’ll need to follow the steps below to upgrade for now (since it’s not officially released yet):

1. Deactivate the Local Market Explorer plugin.
2. Go to the “Recently Active” plugins link.
3. Click the “Delete” link on the plugin to delete all of the files for the plugin. You won’t lose your settings as they’re stored in the database, not in the files.
4. Install the plugin using the plugin “Upload” link.
5. Activate the plugin.

That’s all! It’d be really great to get feedback before this thing is officially released, so if you have anything to say, bugs you found, features you’d like to see, etc, feel free to leave it in the comments.

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.

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 the site infrastructure team building the platform for about 7 years in several different roles. Before leaving CareerBuilder in 2007, I helped to launch the CareerBuilder – Facebook partnership.

In March 2007, I joined HBN Interactive as the CTO and run House Buyer Network – our service helps connect tens of thousands of distressed and motivated home sellers with our network of top tier Real Estate Agents across the US and Canada.

When I read Drew’s post about the new Local Market Explorer plugin (LME) for WordPress, I was giddy. We were on the verge of writing one of these internally for use on some of our domain portfolio, so when I read the team (amattie, jmabe, zillow) had cranked out a new plug-in to localize data across various markets and easily show the data within a WordPress installation, I was more than excited to dig in.

In the following guide (all the scripts and XML for this example are included in a zip file at the end of this post), I’m going to share how you can easily take the LME plug-in and integrate it into your site by loading any number or cities and states from a single XML file. Translation – Create many localized content pages from just a small bit of coding and one XML File.

The site from which we’ll use as our example today is Sell My House Fast. This domain has been in our portfolio for some time as we’ve built it out with tips and ideas for home sellers that need to sell quickly. Naturally, adding in local market data into Sell My House Fast made sense, but I wanted to leverage Local Market Explorer in a more generic sense from a geographic perspective – something that would allow us to easily leverage the plug-in across the entire site. Providing the capability to reach all the states in the US as well as include US cities, all with very little hard coded data points.

The remainder of this post is a step-by-step guide on how to leverage a single XML file along with a one PHP script to control which markets you can show on your website using the Local Market Explorer WordPress plug-in. This installation guide assumes you have a standalone version of WordPress installed on your server and also have FTP and .htaccess modification permissions to your files on your server. Also, if you have some basic PHP and XML knowledge, that’s a plus.

Step 1: Download and Install the Local Market Explorer Plugin

Once you’ve got the plug-in installed, you’ll need to grab the corresponding API keys that it requires to function. This is really easy to do as they’ve included links right from your WordPress admin panel to get your API keys.

After you’ve installed the plug-in and configured it as you would like to see it on your site/blog, you’re ready to take on the next step: adding your custom XML file and integrating it into your blog. For those of you that aren’t too technical, I’m going to make this as simple as possible.

Step 2: Download and Install the ExecPHP WordPress Plugin

For those of you that haven’t used ExecPHP, it’s a really sweet WordPress plug-in. It allows you to execute PHP code within a WordPress blog post or page. You just insert your PHP code to get executed on the fly inside your blog post or page and ExecPHP will take care of it for you.

Step 3: Create a Custom XML file for the cities/states you’d like to include

We could always hard code the path to each link we want to include in our site by writing something like:

Marietta, GA Real Estate Data

But this process can be tedious and doesn’t allow us to easily control how many cities show up on our site without writing a ton of code, or creating a ton of static html pages. And we’re all about decreasing the amount of code we have to write to get things done, right?

So the first thing you’ll need is an XML file. For our example, we’ll use a list of cities in California in our XML file – the file is named citystates.xml. Inside this XML file, we’ve listed some cities in the state of California.

Here’s a snippet:

This file will be loaded at run time via our page we create inside WordPress in just a few minutes. Now that we have the XML file with our cities defined, it’s time to put it to use. If you want more states and cities, just add them using the proper syntax as you see above with the proper xml nodes, etc.

With our XML control file created, it’s time to do the heavy lifting with a PHP script to consume the XML file. This will allow us to display the links easily on your site. We’re going to demonstrate putting this into a WordPress page, but you could just as well include this script in your WordPress sidebar as well by editing your template file.

Step 4: The PHP Page to process the Step 3 XML file you created
The name of our PHP script (page) we’ll be using for this example is load_states.php. This is a really simple PHP script (page) that basically looks at a single querystring parameter (“state”) and then loads the cities for that state found in the XML file. (Again, the zip file at the end of the article contains the files you’ll need to download to run this example)

Inside the load_states.php file, you’ll need to make a couple changes to 2 line numbers: line 12 – $_DomainName = “www.your_domain.com” and line #85 $_LocalXML = “path_to_location_xml.xml” (the path on your web server to the location xml file). Once you make these changes, upload the files to the root directory of your website.

Step 5: Time to test the Page directly…
Once you’ve made the changes to the PHP script (page) and updated your cities/states in the citystates.xml file, it’s time to hit the page directly to do a test. In my case, the page I want to hit in my browser will be: http://www.sellmyhousefast.com/load_states.php?state=California.

Note: this will be your domain, not the Sell My House Fast Domain as is with my example case.

You should see something like this is your browser:

Step 6: Create the WordPress page that will hold your PHP code.

Now that we have all the files in place, it’s time to create a WordPress page that will be the holder of the code that will load the citystates.xml file. In my case, I named the page “Sell By City” – you can see the page in action here: Sell by City

The most important part of this page is the content. You’ll want to take all the PHP code from the php script in Step #4 above and paste it into the page you create inside WordPress.

This will allow you to pass in content to the WordPress Page via the Querystring and let the ExecPHP plugin do the heavy lifting on the fly and create the content for the page dynamically. If you want to add more states or cities to your site, you can simply modify the citystates.xml XML file.

Below is how my example page looks when calling it via “Sell By City” page using the following parameter: sell-by-city/?state=California.

We’re almost done…

Step 7: Creating some SEO Friendly URLs

The final step will allow you to create some SEO friendly URLs for your site at the state level. For example, say we wanted to link to 3 different states on our site but we didn’t want to link to the pages like so:

sell-by-city/?state=California

It would make more sense to link to them directly so they would each be a unique page on the site – something like /local/California.html. That would give us a nice SEO friendly link we could use to link to within our site from maybe our sidebar or our header. To accomplish this last bit of modification, we need to make a slight change to the .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^local/(.+).html load_states.php?state=$1 [nc]

Notice the three lines above. Line #1 ensures you have the Rewrite Engine on (if you are using WordPress you most likely already have this enabled, same with the next line (#2)). The last line is the one that does what we want. This basically tells the web server to take all requests to the /local/STATENAME.html path and really send them over to our PHP file we created in Step #4 above.

That’s really it. In the end, you’ll have a nice dynamic linking system that will allow you to target N number of city/state combos within your site all with links directly into the Local Market Explorer data. My approach is just one of many when it comes to what you can do with the Local Market Explorer plug-in.

I hope this post has expanded your knowledge as to what you might be able to accomplish with a little creativity along with some simple WordPress plug-ins and tools. If you have any questions, please comment on the post and I’ll be more than happy to help out any way that I can! I’d love to hear how you’re using the Local Market Explorer on your site!

Download the XML, PHP and .htaccess samples from this article

Cheers, Matthew

This post isn’t meant to bash the tech providers for not integrating these APIs — it’s meant to start the conversation regarding whether or not consumers would use the added functionality if it were available. After all, the more consumer friendly an agent/broker website is, the more likely the consumer will end up visiting that site over and over throughout their buying experience. That of course makes it more likely the buyer will use that agent to complete their home purchase, which is what pays the bills for an agent/broker at the end of the day. In my opinion, the website vendors who build the most consumer friendly product will win in the long run (a subject Robert Luna recently addressed on the DS blog).

If I’m wrong and one of these vendors — or another real estate technology vendor — have done a really cool integration using one or multiple of these “social” APIs and I just don’t know about it, let me know so I can check it out.

• 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 classifieds service, and covers 2007–present (one-day delay). The sales data is from the New York City Department of Finance and covers 2003–2008. This data could very useful for sites that want to show a high level real estate market comparisons between ZIPs, neighborhoods, or boroughs.

Congrats to the NYT development team for getting this out the door!