« Hop on: Foreclosure Bus Tours | Home | Making Sense of Homeowners Insurance »

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.

Last 5 posts in Zillow API

• Sears' Manage My Home adds Zillow API - March 6th, 2008
• Neighborhood WordPress Plug-in Ideas Using the Zillow API - February 25th, 2008
• A Mashup with Zillow Neighborhood Shapefiles and the Zillow API - January 21st, 2008
• Neighborhood Data Via the Zillow API - December 26th, 2007
• Zillow Partners with 280+ Newspapers for Listings Content - November 12th, 2007

Stumble it!

Enjoy this post? Subscribe to the Zillow Blog feed or get updates via e-mail

Comments