***This article was originally written in 2022, but has been updated for 2024 to reflect new solution providers***
The growth in the PropTech industry, short for “property technology,” is nowhere better demonstrated than by the growth in application programming interfaces (APIs). These interfaces serve real estate professionals, marketers, investors, and anyone seeking real estate and property information.
Real estate APIs are the gateway to extensive data and reports. They use artificial intelligence to streamline property searches, predict market trends, and drive investment decisions. They provide previously unimaginable information such as neighborhood data, crime statistics, geo-based climate risk predictions, and noise pollution. The APIs are integrated into real estate websites for easy access by visitors and subscribers.
Here’s a look at what real estate APIs are, how they work, and what they can do for your platform.
What Are Real Estate APIs and How Do They Work?
APIs are the interface that take a visitor on your website to the data they are looking for. The link the front end to the back-end system using XML, JSON, or other technology.
Some APIs are free, but most APIs charge for the data they provide either through a flat rate, a subscription fee, or a fee that you negotiate with them. In most cases, the more you pay, the more data you can access and deliver to clients.
Depending on the API, they might just provide datasets, such as MLS listings or they might incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) or machine-learning tools to extract more meaningful data, trends, and patterns from that data.
Why Use APIs?
APIs provide instant access to real estate data or real estate professionals, investors, marketers, lenders, and service providers. It’s not just real estate brokers or property developers who benefit from API data. Anyone whose business can benefit from insights into property owners, neighborhoods, demographics, schools, weather, even environmental hazards can use APIs to drive business. Here are some of the ways APIs power business.
- Access to Comprehensive Data
APIs provide real-time access to extensive real estate data including listings, property values, neighborhood statistics. These data are critical to business and investing decisions.
- Personalized Customer Experience
Real estate APIs offer data to your clients in a format that best suits their needs, such as interactive maps or curated property reports.
- Market Insights
APIs combine AI tools, data, and machine learning to extricate insights from market trends.
- Efficiencies in Time and Cost
APIs instantly update your website or app with real-time property and real estate information. They will boost your SEO, increase traffic to your site, automate documentation, and power your analytics all at a fraction of the cost. APIs do the legwork for you.
- Improved Branding and Property Listings
APIs produce print-ready property listings and reports. Their accuracy and professional appearance boost your reputation and branding.
- Competitive Edge from Customization
Proptech technology and APIs are a way to gain a competitive edge in the market. Companies can choose to specialize and serve specific customer needs or niche markets.
How to Choose a Real Estate API?
Data and APIs are used at every stage of the property transaction cycle. From listings searches to assessing investment risk, technology optimizes the process for everyone involved. An increasing number of buyers and sellers rely on digital solutions to navigate the purchasing or selling process.
Because of the obvious value to users, the ProTech sector is becoming saturated with startup APIs, so which ones should you use? Consider what information you want to provide to your audience and, of course, the cost of the APIs.
Best Real Estate APIs in 2024
Here’s a look at 10 of the best real estate APIs for 2024, their product features, and the price.
1. ATTOM
ATTOM is a leading source of commercial and residential real estate data in the United States. ATTOM’s real estate API delivers property, neighborhood, valuation, and environmental data, and more, to investors and real estate professionals. Lenders and home service providers also benefit from 70 billion rows of data and 9,000 discrete data attributes for 155 million U.S. properties. ATTOM consolidates a wealth of property-centered data offered by other solutions on one platform. In addition to extensive data, ATTOM’s Enterprise Data Management Program (EDMP) validates, standardizes, and blends property data with other datasets such as neighborhood, natural hazard, and environmental data. ATTOM uses REST architecture style and response formats are JSON and XML.
Product Features
- Data sources: County assessor and recorder offices, real estate brokers and agents, and third-party providers, such as school rating agencies
- Property data: property details, addresses, ownership details, recent home sales history, ATTOMIZED AVM, owner and mortgage details, schools ratings, property valuations
- Area data: neighborhood boundaries, school attendance zones
- Points of interest: Restaurants, banks, shopping
- Community data: crime, population, education, weather stats and averages, commuter times, climate change information
2. Zillow
Zillow is a huge name in the real estate digital space with a collection of close to 20 APIs and datasets on over 100 million homes in the United States. The APIs include mortgages, MLS listings, and public data for property estimates and transactions. This API delivers home values, rental prices, and neighborhood statistics. Developers can use Zillow API data to enhance websites, mobile apps, research tools, or data analysis. MLS partners in the US and Canada determine who has access, and the API is currently available by invitation only. Zillow’s API uses REST architecture.
Product Features
- Data sources: Public records, user-submitted data, multiple listing services (MLS), and proprietary algorithms
- Property details data: home values, rental prices, mortgage rates, address, features, facts, and photos
- Home valuation data: Zestimate (Zillow’s estimated market value), other valuation-related data, such as comparable homes, valuation range, and historical Zestimates
- Neighborhood data: population, income, education, crime data, and climate information
- Mortgage data: Mortgage rates, affordability calculators
3. Homesage.ai
Homesage.ai offers a variety of APIs that serve lenders, realtors, IT developers, and contractors. A sampling of its products are Deal Value, Flip ROI, Investment Potential, Long and Short-Term Rental ROI, Price Flexibility Score, Property Condition, and Renovation Cost. All of the data are targeted toward augmenting creative AI-based applications for end-users. Homesage.ai uses REST architecture, and response formats are JSON.
Product Features
- Property data: listing price, property history, property Images, interior features, location/Community
- Building information: lot, parking
- Short-term and long=tern rental information:
- Neighborhood data: school ratings
- Property development: renovation cost estimates, price flexibility score, deal value, spread, value gap, estimated value increases
- Fix and flip returns: Total project cost, profit, resale ROI, maximum recommended renovation budget
- Investor data: FLIP ROI, long and short-term rental ROI
- RE, short/long term rental ROI, property condition, ARV
4. Realtors Property Resource
The Realtors Property Resource is an extensive real estate data source serving real estate professionals who are members of the National Association of Realtors. The API provides access to comprehensive real estate databases covering over 160 million property records, including public reports, deeds, mortgages, and analytics. Realtors Property Resource uses RPC architectural style and XML and SOAP response formats.
Product Features
- Data sources: public records, multiple listing service (MLS), third-party data providers, and NAR partner organizations
- Property data: deeds, valuations, sales history, mortgages, tax assessments, school boundaries, flood maps
- Market data: Trends, forecasts, and local market comparison
- Property location: Demographic, psychographic, and spending data, businesses, points of interest
5. Google Maps
The Google Maps API offers geocoding and region localization. API users can add maps and layers to their site to show customized data and listings, Googlemaps offers satellite and ground-level imagery, points of interest, and directions. Google Maps is a primary source of geodata for real estate professionals. Google Maps uses REST architecture and supports XML, JSON, and KML response formats.
Product Features
- Geodata: listings, maps, business, photos, satellite images
- Directions: Google Maps provides driving, walking, and public transit directions.
- Street view: panoramic street views with navigation
- Business listings: Google Maps includes a directory of businesses and points of interest, ratings, reviews
- Satellite and aerial imagery: satellite and aerial imagery of locations around the world.
- Customization and integration: ability to add custom layers and markers to the maps to build custom map-based applications
6. School Digger
Many real estate buyers, whether they are looking for a home or to invest in a development project, want to research the local schools. SchoolDigger API K-12 data offers data on over 120,000 public and private schools. Data include college readiness, district attendance boundaries, demographics, and test scores. JSON is used for responses.
Product Features
- Location
- Grade Level
- Reviews
- Public or Private
- Contact
7. ClimateCheck
ClimateCheck provides property buyers, owners, and brokers with climate risk data, assessments, and reports. The hazards covered include storm surge, inland flooding, precipitation, Lat/Lon, Address or APN, water scarcity, bounding box, zip or census, and drought. The data also offer geographic comparisons over time. These data are designed to mitigate risk for lenders, investors, corporations, retail, and commercial lease holders. ClimateCheck’s team of Ph.D. scientists parse global climate datasets to provide risk ratings with projections up to the year 2050. This API uses REST architectural style and supports JSON and XML response formats.
Product Features:
- Risk Data: Physical climate risk data, maps, portfolio risk analysis
- Property reports: property reports with a narrative explanation of physical climate risk
- Regional data: expected flood depth, expected temperature changes, expected wildfire risk.
8. AirDna
AirDNA provides short-term rental data and analytics for over 10 million properties in 120,000+ markets. The API’s audience is Airbnb and Vrbo stakeholders who seek pricing, performance, and profitability data for short-term rentals. The API uses REST architecture style.
Product Features
- Property valuations: Annual and monthly revenues, average daily rates (ADR), occupancy projections with comparables
- Listing data: Property features, rental performance for Airbnb listings
- Market data: Market statistics for the last calendar month, historical and future data for supply and demand, occupancy, and revenue (RevPAR)
- Property availability: Availability and estimated property prices
- Smart rates: Dynamic pricing data and recommendations for pricing
9. RentCast
RentCast provides rental data such as property records, valuation estimates, active listings and real estate market trends for over 140,000 residential and commercial properties across the United States. The API is powered by Realty Mole. RentCast uses REST architectural style.
Product Features
- Data sources: Public records, MLS feeds, and listing aggregators
- Property records: structural attributes, features, tax assessment history, past sales, current owner information
- Valuation estimates: home value and rent estimates (AVM) for any properties with comps
- Active listings: List of for-sale and for-rent listings including description, status, listed price, days on the market
- Market trends: historical rent trends, market averages, listing and composition statistics by zip code
10. Datafiniti
Datafiniti provides residential and commercial listings, sold properties, rentals, and STR data for 72 million real estate records. The data enrichment feature appends data to existing property listing data. The API has a search portal and provides bulk downloads. This API uses REST architecture style.
Product Features
- Data sources: Public records, third-party data partnerships
- Property data: Property details such as year built, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, pools, fireplaces, and garages
- Listing data: Real estate agents, sales prices, rental prices, property taxes
- Property location: Street address, city, state, zip code, latitude, longitude
- Property owner: name, phone number, email address
10 of the Best Real Estate APIs in 2024
The landscape of real estate APIs and data solutions is quickly becoming obscured with new solutions mixed with the old. This growth in PropTech is encouraging, but it adds complexity to those seeking the most practical and usable solutions that fit end-user needs. That’s why we compiled this list of what we consider the leading solutions for the year ahead.
If you’re curious to learn more about ATTOM’s real estate API, contact an ATTOM representative today!
