Retsly 2015 Hackathon Sparks Next-Gen Real Estate Solutions

This past weekend, Retsly hosted its zip.code 2015 'hackathon' in Zillow Group’s San Francisco offices, where 150 developers hunkered down from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, creating fresh real estate products using Retsly Listings and Public Data APIs. Vancouver-based Retsly, part of Zillow Group, is a software company that normalizes real estate data from multiple listing services so developers can build data-driven products for the real estate industry.

Retsly gave hackathon participants access to live listings data from the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS), Hawaii Information Service (HIS), the Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board (OMREB) and public records data — including 620 million mortgage, transfer and assessment records from over 3,200 U.S. counties. Competitors were tasked to “think all things real estate: agents, property listings, transactions, mortgages” and create products using data-based next-generation solutions for real estate.

The $5,500 top prize for Best Use of Listing Data went to AbleHome, designed to help people with disabilities find properties with features such as ramps, disability parking and ground-floor living spaces, assigning weights to each feature to compile a home’s disability-friendly score.

CompHomes took the $5,500 top prize for Best Use of Public Data. The product allows home owners to track data that could potentially affect the value of their own property, such as tax assessments and the number of active listings on the market.

The $5,000 top prize for Crowd Favorite went to Holmes, who created a mobile app that allows buyers to use augmented reality to find homes: Buyers hold their smartphones up to an active listing, then see nearby homes and filter selections such as school data, zone boundaries and neighborhood amenities.

Check out the Retsly zip.code 2015 hackathon Twitter feed using the #zipcode hashtag.