Trulia, the real estate search site that lets you search for homes for sale and look at housing price trends across the USA, has opened its API. If you’ve got the programming chops and an idea, you can use the Trulia API to get:
- Real estate price trends for any state, county, city, ZIP code and neighborhood in the U.S.
- Information about real estate online search behaviour dating back to June 2006.
According to the announcment in the Trulia blog, the practical upshot of having access to their API will mean that you can write applications to answer questions such as: “What was the average price of a 2-bedroom home in ZIP 94002 on the week of 11/27/2006?” (The answer is $809,533) or “Which neighborhood was the biggest winner/loser in Manhattan over the past 6 months in terms of search traffic?” (The biggest winner was the Flatiron District, the biggest loser was Battery Park City).
I can see some interesting mash-ups as a result of this API becoming available. Imagine an application that let you cross-reference real estate with other geographic data that househunters are interested in, such as nearby schools, groceries, shopping centres, public transit and so on. Or perhaps you might want to test the generally accepted theory of the “Starbucks effect“: that a nearby Starbucks will raise the value of homes in the area.
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