Comparing Real Estate Markets with the Zillow API

Fair warning — this post is highly geared toward Web developers, or real estate techies who understand XML.

My colleague, Peter Quinlan, wrote a post on the Geek Estate Blog highlighting the fact that no one has really nailed the neighborhood or city comparison tool as of yet. He personally went through the relocation process a year ago and eventually settled in the Auburn real estate market. Though a neighborhood or city comparison tool is obviously something I’d like to see Zillow do, it’s not at the very top of our current product priority list. So, I’ll admit we’re just as guilty as the other technology companies that haven’t built a tool to allow people to quickly compare neighborhoods and cities. Fortunately, all of the data you’d need to create this sort of comparison tool is available via the Zillow API in our GetDemographics API call.

Though I included this idea as one of my WordPress plug-in ideas, I wanted to give a little bit more of an overview as to how to use the GetDemographics to accomplish this task.

Say, for example, that you wanted to compare the Belltown and Capitol Hill neighborhoods in Seattle, WA. This would really only take two API calls to gather all the data, then it would be up to you to put that data into a format that fits your blog or Web site.

Here’s the GetDemographics call required to return Zillow data for Belltown:

http://www.zillow.com/webservice/GetDemographics.htm?zws-id=

<your zws-id>&state=WA&city=Seattle&neighborhood=Ballard

Here’s the GetDemographics call required to return Zillow data for Capitol Hill:

http://www.zillow.com/webservice/GetDemographics.htm?zws-id=

<your zws-id>&state=WA&city=Seattle&neighborhood=capitol%hill

Here is part of the result set for Capitol Hill (click HERE for complete dataset in xml format):

– <request>
<state>WA</state>
<city>Seattle</city>
</request>
– <message>
<text>Request successfully processed</text>
<code>0</code>
</message>
– <response>
– <region>
<id>16037</id>
<state>Washington</state>
<city>Seattle</city>
</region>
– <links>
<main>http://www.zillow.com/real-estate/WA-Seattle</main>
– <affordability>
http://www.zillow.com/real-estate/WA-Seattle-affordability
</affordability>
– <homesandrealestate>
http://www.zillow.com/real-estate/WA-Seattle-real-estate
</homesandrealestate>
– <people>
http://www.zillow.com/real-estate/WA-Seattle-neighbors
</people>
</links>
– <charts>
– <chart>
<name>Average Condo Value</name>
– <url>
http://www.zillow.com/app?chartType=affordability_avgCondoValue&
graphType=barChart&regionId=16037&regionType=6&service=chart
</url>
</chart>
– <chart>
<name>Average Home Value</name>
– <url>
http://www.zillow.com/app?chartType=affordability_avgHomeValue&
graphType=barChart&regionId=16037&regionType=6&service=chart
</url>
</chart>
– <chart>
<name>Dollars Per Square Feet</name>
– <url>
http://www.zillow.com/app?chartType=affordability_pricePerSqft&
graphType=barChart&regionId=16037&regionType=6&service=chart
</url>
</chart>

Voila, you now have all the data! Just put it into a user-friendly format for your audience and watch your traffic increase.