Overview of the Zillow API Program (with Examples)

Everyday via e-mail, I get and answer this same question: “What is available in the API?”

My response is:

For consumers navigating the home buying/selling process, or tracking home value or local area real estate trends, the Zillow API provides a wealth of great real estate and mortgage data.

At a high level, the available data in the Zillow API breaks down into 4 primary buckets:

1) Zestimates & property data on 90 million homes – We have Zestimates on roughly 70 million homes and data on 90 million homes. When I say data on 90 million homes, I mean information such as beds, baths, square footage, lot size, tax assessed value, and last sale date and price. The most common use case for this data is a home valuation lookup integrated directly into your site. In addition, brokerages such as Redfin and ZipRealty and IDX vendors like Diverse Solutions and Roost have integrated Zestimates directly into their listing detail pages.

Examples:

• Prudential Cal/Tex/Nev
• Southern Winds Realty
• Ditech (Zillow Blog post: “Welcome Ditech to API program”)

2) City/neighborhood/ZIP home value and market information – Market statistics from our overhauled home value pages, demographic, and other data about homes down to the ZIP or neighborhood level (where we have neighborhood boundaries).

Banks.com example

Examples:

• Banks.com’s Seattle example (Zillow Blog post: “An Example of City Data from the Zillow API - Banks.com”)
• RealestateABC’s Boston example (Zillow Blog post: “Welcome RealEstateABC to the Zillow API Program”)

If you’re interested in neighborhood information, your options are outlined here.

3) Recent sales data – Transaction data for the most-recent sales per region (ZIP, neighborhood, city). You can see an example of the data in the “market activity” module seen on this Seattle page built with the Local Market Explorer WordPress Plugin. (Note this is a private API call. To request access to this API, simply fill out the API upgrade form located here and select “Recent Sales Data” in the API request type field).

Local Market Explorer Example

4) Real-time mortgage rates – At Zillow, we feel we have the most accurate and up-to-date mortgage rates available online, and make them available to other sites via the Mortgage API to utilize in a variety of ways. Here’s a great example: Homethinking’s integration of state mortgage rates via the GetRateSummary API is effective. To see more examples, I blogged about other Mortgage API implementations back in March. For examples of agent Web sites using Zillow’s rates, Z57 and Agent Image are both now utilizing our mortgage data on their clients’ Web sites.

HomeThinking example

Our GetMonthlyPayments API returns an estimated monthly payment based on today’s live rates for a specific loan amount. Dwellicious’ implementation is another good example. For those interested in adding a “monthly payment estimate” module to a listing detail page, here is sample “monthly payment estimate” code that may help your development team speed up the integration process.

If you have any feedback regarding what’s currently in the API, please let us know. In addition to our API program, we have a number of real estate and mortgage widgets that could be a good fit for your Web site depending on what you are looking for and what your technical capabilities are.

Happy coding!