Free Data Sources for Your Real Estate Web Site

I think most of you will agree with me that data is a critical piece of building a fantastic consumer destination — not only in the real estate vertical, but other verticals as well. In the real estate space,  buyers, sellers, and home owners are interested in local home values, crime statistics, weather, amenities, and school information (among other things). But where do you find all this data? There are a wide range of free data sources out there that can help you fill your real estate web site with valuable content. Here’s a rundown of a few of the data sets I’m aware of:

Demographic Data:

• 2000 Census data – The 2000 Census dataset is available for download from the US Census Bureau. Here is the ftp download server.

Local Amenities:

• Yelp Review Search API – You can retrieve local business information and reviews using a neighborhood or lat/long value as an input. It’s also possible to narrow the results by category of business.

Neighborhood and City Home Values:

• Zillow Local Real Estate APIs – You can retrieve local home value trend charts with the GetRegionChart API and a wealth of other city and neighborhood home value data from the GetDemographics API.
• AltosCharts – Local market price charts.

Neighborhood Geographies:

• Zillow Neighborhood Boundaries – 150 cities covering 7,000 neighborhoods available via a Creative Commons license.
• Yelp Neighborhood API – Input a lat/long value and get a neighborhood in return.
• Zillow GetRegionChildren API – Input a city and state, and receive a list of neighborhoods and their center points in return.

School Information:

• Education.com Schoolfinder API – For an overview of the available data, take a look at my Geek Estate post back in September when Education.com released their API.
• NCES Common Core of Data – Data about all public elementary and secondary schools, all local education agencies, and all state education agencies throughout the United States — descriptive information on schools and school districts; data on students and staff; and fiscal data.

Weather:

• Yahoo Weather API – enter a ZIP or a geo location and receive current weather conditions in return.
• WeatherBug API – Live weather conditions by location.

I know there are other free data resources that I’m missing (I couldn’t find a free source for crime statistics) — if you aware of any additional sources that would be useful for a real estate audience, please leave a comment describing the data and where to find it. Are there any data sets you wish were freely available, but haven’t been able to get your hands on?