Datafeed Management by Three Legged Toad

Real estate search company Zillow has opened two APIs to allow other sites to utilize its data on homes around the US. The company made news last month when Yahoo! became one of the earliest users of the pre-launch API on its real estate site. There were more than 30 pre-launch users of the API in total, also including Prudential Northern California and Nevada, ZipRealty and Redfin.

In addition to its own data, Zillow now includes home information uploaded by home owners.
The site also offers mobile access and a 3-D view of homes based on Microsoft’s “bird’s eye view.” If you haven’t tried entering a few addresses into Zillow before, I recommend doing it for fun if nothing else.

Now third parties will be able to access and incorporate on their web sites either of two data sets, one on home valuations and the other on property details. Use of the APIs is free and users can make 1,000 per day by default. This is a very smart marketing move on Zillow’s part. One of the best ways for small web sites to grow in functionality and sophistication is to offer rich data from off-site integrated into their own offerings. That’s happening with everything from video search to syndicated photographs as well. The move towards highly portable data makes this a very exciting time for small web site publishers, who are more easily than every before able to wrap a feature rich environment around their own core value proposition.

Seattle based Zillow has raised a massive $57 million in venture backing and launched its beta site in February of this year. To go from launch to being one of the major providers of data to top sites in your field in 8 months is impressive. That’s made possible in large part because of Zillow’s executive team, lead by Expedia founder and former CEO Rich Barton and former Expedia senior vice president Lloyd Frink.

Other startups doing similar work include Trulia , RealEstateABC, and Redfin.

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Tags: Techcrunch, Web2.0, realestate, search, homes, API,

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