Making informed investment decisions relies on having timely access to reliable data. But, this can be a real challenge with so many segmented and unreliable data sources. Real estate APIs offer a way for businesses to leverage clean data to build their own custom data analytics tools, pipe data into existing tools, or some combination of the two.
In this article, we’ll share 10 of the best real estate APIs that are designed to help you unlock real estate marketplace insights and drive better investment decision making. By the end of this article, you’ll be equipped with the tools to choose the right real estate API and start leveraging data to access unrivaled market insights.
What is a real estate API?
Real estate APIs are web services that provide access to various types of data related to the real estate industry. For example, you can use real estate data APIs to get information about properties, listings, prices, mortgages, neighborhoods, schools, crime, and more. Real estate APIs can be useful for real estate software developers, investors, brokers, agents, and anyone who needs reliable and up-to-date real estate data.
What can real estate APIs be used for?
Real estate APIs can be used in a variety of ways to facilitate data-driven decision-making in the real estate industry. They serve as a bridge, connecting different software systems and allowing them to share and utilize a range of property-related information. Real estate listing APIs can be used to:
- Build data analysis tools that provide real estate professionals and investors direct access to market trend data, local property information, and investment insights.
- Enhance user experience and engagement on real estate websites or apps, by providing highly relevant information such as neighborhood walk scores or crime ratings.
- Automate tasks and workflows for real estate companies who have traditionally pulled, organized, and filtered data manually.
- Develop PropTech products or services that leverage access to real-time, real estate data.
What do I need to know about APIs?
If you’re looking to leverage real estate APIs, you may have some questions about APIs in general - how they work and what you need to know before you explore leveraging them. So, let’s go through a few things that will be helpful to know about APIs:
- APIs work as intermediaries, taking user requests or other system requests and directing the backend system to supply the relevant information. You can integrate real estate APIs into your own software application to leverage data access.
- APIs utilize XML, JSON, or other data exchange formats to pass data between systems or software applications.
APIs can have a variety of pricing models:
- Free - open access, no payment required
- Flat rate - as long as you pay, you can use the data
- Frequency subscription - the more you pay, the more data you can get in the unit of time
- Completeness of data subscription - the more you pay, the more comprehensive or complete the data is
- Individually negotiated - access is negotiated based on your specific needs
APIs vary in their scope. Some APIs provide basic datasets like MLS-based real estate listings, while others utilize AI or machine learning to derive useful insights from raw data.
Top 10 Picks for Best Real Estate APIs
Navigating the diverse landscape of real estate APIs can be as complex as real estate investing itself. However, if you're a business endeavoring to establish or enhance your footprint in the real estate domain, integrating with the right APIs can make all the difference. Here, we've assembled a list of the top 10 standout real estate APIs for businesses. Each has the potential to not just augment your operations but to position you at the vanguard of the industry. Let’s dive in.
ATTOM Property Data API
ATTOM is a leading provider of real estate market data, offering access to more than 70 billion rows of data and 9,000 discrete data attributes for 155 million U.S. properties, covering 99 percent of the nation’s population. ATTOM's API is a self-serving platform that allows users to query and integrate property and neighborhood data into their products and applications.
Category: General - residential & commercial real estate
Data sources: County assessor and recorder offices, real estate brokers and agents, and third-party providers, such as school rating agencies
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the API:
- 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 data: Restaurants, banks, shopping
- Community data: crime, population, education, weather stats and averages, commuter times, climate change information
Free trial access: ATTOM offers a free trial for its Property Data API. You can request a free trial account on their website.
Price: $850 - $2,000/mo ($$$$)
Rentcast (formerly Realty Mole)
RentCast is a real estate data API that provides on-demand access to 140,000+ property records, valuation estimates, active listings and real estate market trends for residential and commercial properties across the US. RentCast API is powered by Realty Mole, a leading provider of real estate data solutions. RentCast API is designed to help real estate agents, real estate investors, developers and researchers with their data needs.
Category: Real estate rentals
Data sources: Public records, MLS feeds, and listing aggregators
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the API:
- Property records: property structural attributes, features, tax assessment history, last sale information and current owner details
- Valuation estimates: home value and rent estimates (AVM) for any property based on its characteristics and nearby comparable listings. The API also provides an estimated range and a list of comps.
- Active listings: List of for-sale and for-rent listings in all 50 states, along with a description, status, listed price and days on the market
- Market trends: historical rent trends, market averages, listing and composition statistics for any US zip code
Free trial access: Free API plan available, which includes up to 50 free API calls per month
Price: $0-449/mo ($$)
Zillow Real Estate APIs
Zillow is a leading online real estate marketplace that provides data and insights on over 100 million homes across the United States. Zillow APIs are a set of web services that allow developers to access real estate data from Zillow Group. The Zillow API provides information on home values, rental prices, neighborhood statistics, mortgage rates, and more. Developers can use the Zillow API to create applications for various platforms and purposes, such as websites, mobile apps, research tools, or data analysis.
Access to the data is determined by individual MLS partners in the US and Canada, and the API is currently available by invitation only.
Category: Residential real estate
Data sources: Public records, user-submitted data, multiple listing services (MLS), and proprietary algorithms
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the API:
- Home valuation data: Zestimate (Zillow's estimated market value), other valuation-related data, such as comparable homes, valuation range, and historical Zestimates
- Property details data: Address, features, facts, photos, and more
- Neighborhood data: Demographic and geographic data for a given region, such as population, income, education, crime data, and climate information
- Mortgage data: Current mortgage rates and quotes from multiple lenders, as well as affordability calculators and other mortgage-related tools
Free trial access: Zillow's APIs are free to use for non-commercial purposes, subject to certain usage limits and terms of use. You need to register for a Zillow Web Services ID (ZWSID) to access the APIs. You can also request additional API calls if you exceed the usage limits.
Price: $0-250/month ($)
Datafiniti Property Data API
The Property Data API from Datafiniti provides access to 172 million real estate records. The data includes information on both residential and commercial listings, sold properties, rentals, and STRs. Using the data enrichment feature, you can pass in existing property listing data and Datafiniti will append it. In addition to the property API, users can access data via a search portal and bulk downloads.
Category: Commercial and residential real estate
Data sources: Online records, third-party data partnerships, public information
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the API:
- Property details: Type of property, size, year built, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, additional features like pools, fireplaces, or garages
- Listing data: Real estate agent information, sales prices, rental prices, pet policies, AND property taxes
- Property location: Address, city, province, state, zip code, latitude, longitude
- Property owner: Current owner name, phone number, email address
Free trial access: Users can sign up for a 2-week free trial account on the Datafiniti website and get access to 1k free records.
Price: $119-$3999/mo ($$$$)
Realtors Property Resource
Realtors Property Resource (RPR) is a platform that provides comprehensive data, powerful analytics, and client-friendly reports for real estate professionals. It is exclusively available to members of the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) as a member benefit. RPR helps agents, brokers, appraisers, and associations to make informed decisions and impress clients.
It provides access to comprehensive real estate databases of over 130 million property records, including public reports, deeds, mortgages, and analytics. RPR also offers tools and reports to help real estate professionals market their services, communicate with clients, and close more deals.
Category: General - residential & commercial real estate
Data sources: public records, multiple listing service (MLS), third-party data providers, and NAR partner organizations
Architectural style: RPC (Remote Procedure Call) using XML and SOAP protocols
Data available via the API:
- Property data: Detailed information on over 160 million real estate properties in the US, including public records, deeds, mortgages, valuations, sales history, tax assessments, school zones, flood maps, and more
- Market data: Trends, forecasts, and comparisons for local markets, neighborhoods, and properties
- Property location: Demographic, psychographic, and spending data for any geographic area, as well as business points of interest and opportunity zones
- Commercial data: Verified lease and sales comps from CompStak Exchange, as well as property listings from Crexi
Free trial access: RPR does not offer a free trial access to its API. However, NAR members can access the RPR website and mobile app for free by creating an account with their NRDS ID.
Price: Free for NAR members ($)
RealEstateAPI.com
RealEstateAPI.com is a platform that provides access to comprehensive data on over 150 million properties and owners in the US. It is designed for developers who want to build disruptive prop-tech applications with smart APIs and machine-learning capabilities. It offers a variety of endpoints to fetch, manipulate and analyze real property data in real-time.
In addition to the API, there is a web application with search functionality and CSV generator.
Category: Prop-tech developer-focused
Data sources: Over 200 data sources, including county assessor records, MLS listings data, public records, proprietary data sets and third-party vendors.
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the API:
- Property detail: Provides physical and financial details on every parcel in the US, such as square footage, lot size, bed/bath count, tax, mortgage, liens, sales history, foreclosure status, etc.
- Property comps: Returns an array of current comparable sales for a given property based on similarity and proximity.
- Parcel boundary: Geographic coordinates of the property boundary for a given address.
- Address auto-complete: Suggests possible addresses based on user input
- Address verification: Checks if an address is valid and deliverable.
- Property detail bulk: Allows users to retrieve property details for multiple addresses in one request
- Skip trace bulk: Allows users to retrieve contact information for multiple owners in one request
Free trial access: Offers a free trial for 14 days with 500 API calls per day
Price: Contact the vendor for pricing
Mashvisor
Mashvisor is a real estate data company that provides real estate investors and agents with access to granular and summary level information, in-depth property performance analysis, and up-to-date calculations of performance metrics for cities, zip codes, and neighborhoods across the United States, covering over 450,000 properties. Mashvisor also offers unique predictive analytics based on big data and AI algorithms to help users find the best places and properties to invest in.
Category: Residential, short term & long term rentals
Data sources: MLS providers, Airbnb API, public records, census data, user-generated content, and proprietary algorithms
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the property details API:
- Short term rental data: Property information such as an area’s income, occupancy estimates, cash flow, and reviews to help estimate the profitability of a short-term rental
- Long term rentals data: Forecast of rental income, occupancy, cash flow, and return on investment designed to aid in identifying profitable long-term investment properties
- Property data: MLS listing information, including property characteristics, rental history, sales history, tax details, owner information, and neighborhood data for fair market value assessment.
- Rental rates: Estimated average rental rates for short term and long term rentals, categorized by the number of bedrooms, enabling informed pricing decisions
- Mashvisor unique analytics: Predictive analytics that can be used to evaluate the investment potential of housing markets and individual rental properties, supported by big data and AI algorithms
Free trial access: No free trial available, but a free demo is available by request
Price: $29.99 - $119/mo ($)
AirDNA
AirDNA is a global leader in short-term rental data and analytics, handling comprehensive data from over 10 million properties in 120,000+ markets. Through innovative data extraction methods and partnerships with property managers and hosts, AirDNA provides extremely accurate, CBRE-validated data to Airbnb and Vrbo stakeholders. The company's API offers users valuable insights into pricing, performance, and profitability, thereby empowering them to achieve their short-term rental goals. Remarkably, AirDNA's data accuracy reaches 97.5% for active supply of vacation rentals and 96.2% for revenue data, reinforcing their commitment to reliable, actionable insights.
Category: Short term rentals
Data sources: Airbnb's website and API, proprietary sources, an machine learning algorithms
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the API:
- Property valuations: Annual and monthly revenue, average daily rates (ADR), and occupancy projections with up to 10 comparable properties
- Listing data: Property attributes and rental performance for single or multiple Airbnb listings, as well as availability data for a given time period
- Market data: Overview of market statistics for the last calendar month, as well as historical and future data on supply, demand, rates, occupancy, revenue, and RevPAR for a market organized by bedroom count, month, and year
- Property availability: Availability and estimated price of a single property
- Smart rates: Dynamic pricing data and recommendations for a property
Free trial access: AirDNA does not offer a free trial for its API, but users can request a demo or contact the sales team to get a quote and a private token.
Price: $12 - $599/mo ($$)
Reonomy
Reonomy is a company that provides commercial real estate intelligence through data solutions. Reonomy data connects properties, companies, people, and transactions across the US. Reonomy data solutions include scheduled data delivery, live data integration, and property search engine.
Category: Commercial real estate
Data sources: Public records, proprietary sources, and third-party vendors. Reonomy data is verified and enriched using machine learning and human validation.
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the API:
- Property details: Basic information such as address, asset type, building area, lot area, year built, etc.
- Ownership information: Reported owner name, contact information, mailing address, etc.
- Tenant information: Tenant name, industry, lease start and end dates, etc.
- Sale information: Sale date, price, buyer and seller names, etc.
- Mortgage information: Loan amount, lender name, interest rate type, loan type, etc.
- Foreclosure information: Foreclosure date, document type, deed category, etc.
- Tax information: Assessed value, tax amount, tax year, etc.
- Parcel shape information: GeoJSON representation of the property boundaries.
Free trial access: 14-day free trial is available for the web application. To access the API, you need to request an API key from Reonomy and sign a contract.
Price: $399-1,197/mo ($$$)
Compstak
CompStak is a commercial real estate data platform that provides lease and sales comps, property details, and market analytics. It sources its data from verified and active professionals at commercial brokerages and appraisal firms, as well as public records. It offers various products and services, including API integrations that allow users to access CompStak premium property data directly from their applications. Access 60k+ monthly comps nationwide with over 80 data fields per comp, including rent, address, tenant name, transaction date, lease term, cap rate, and more.
Category: Commercial real estate
Data sources: Data is gathered from verified and active professionals at commercial brokerages and appraisal firms who contribute lease and sales comps in exchange for access to the platform. It also uses public records for some sales comps. Every comp undergoes an extensive collection and review process by CompStak’s team of real estate data experts to ensure reliability.
Architectural style: REST
Data available via the API:
- Market insights: Rents, concessions for various markets, heat maps and reports for visualization
- Property data: Building comparisons via CompStak's Market Rent Algorithm, market rent calculations based on a building's competitive set, space square footage, and floor space, historical market rent, free rent, and work value along with similar recent lease details
- Property standardization: Match and eliminate duplicate data with CompStak. Handle properties with multiple parcels, addresses, and more.
Free trial access: CompStak does not offer a free trial for its API integrations. However, it does offer a demo upon request.
Price: Free ($)
Real Estate Software Development with SoftKraft
Leverage our extensive expertise in real estate software development to harness the power of real estate data, or even build a bespoke PropTech software solution.
Our team is experienced in working with real estate APIs as well as web scraping real estate portals to help you maximize your ROI. Check out what we’ve built for other business clients or reach out to get a personalized quote.