***This article was originally written in 2020, but has been updated for 2023 to reflect new solution providers***
Real estate APIs provide real-time data on the housing market. These tools are a great asset for real estate professionals looking to automate updates to listing platforms, apps, or websites, in order to provide clients and customers with reliable and up-to-date real estate data.
In this post, we explore what a real estate API is in more and detail and offer 5 of the leading solutions currently available.
What is a Real Estate API?
Realtyna defines an API as:
“A software tool that acts as an intermediary between an application and the data produced by another application. APIs package functions for retrieving this information, which allows for greater speed and agility with any related programming.”
In the real estate world, an API (also known as an application programming interface) transfers property listing data from the MLS to an agent website or real estate application. Real estate APIs are efficient and fast, retrieving data as and when needed – reducing hosting costs.
Real Estate APIs: 5 of the Best Real Estate APIs
Real estate APIs are growing in popularity, Currently, there are more than 200 real estate APIs on the market. How do you find the top real estate APIs for your needs? We explore 5 of the best below.
1. Estated API
Estated offers off-market real estate data on over 140 million property listings – including commercial and residential real estate properties. Estated offer users insights into structure, parcel, assessment, and sales data. They pride themselves on ease of integration, with a set up that they claim takes minutes to complete.
Targeted at real estate professionals and companies looking to improve their analytics, workflows, and lead generation, the Estated team offer a series of price plans. The ‘Starter’ and ‘Professional’ payment plans offer 100 free records. The ‘Enterprise’ plan provides onboarding and training, with volume discounts.
2. Realtors Property Resource API
The Realtors Property Resource API enables users to integrate public records data with their webpages. The RPR pools nationwide coverage from over 130 million property records. Currently, the RPR only provide API access to MLS organizations. They offer nationwide data on:
- Public records
- Deed
- Stand-alone mortgage records
3. SimplyRETS API
The SimplyRETS API provides developers and agents with MLS listing and market data. Using the SimplyRETS platform, users can access real-time residential real estate data to build real estate applications and websites.
SimplyRETS offer three plans. The ‘Basic’ costs $49 per month. It offers 5,000 searchers per day and provides real estate data on residential listings, condo listings, and rental properties.
The ‘Premium’ plan costs $99 per month and offers 10,000 searches each day. This plan includes active, pending, and sold listings. It goes beyond the basic plan by offering commercial and multi-family listings – as well as residential listings.
The ‘Enterprise’ plan offers 50,000 searches per day; includes active, pending, and sold listings; covers open houses; provides commercial listings; and offers data on land listings.
4. Spark API
Spark API provides real estate data to authorized MLS members. The Spark API offers three key categories of real estate data: listings, contacts, and market stats. The level of data available depends on the role assigned to each user; Spark note that MLS members can access more data on listings than consumers on an IDX website.
5. ATTOM Property API
We may be biased, but the ATTOM Property API does offer one of the most comprehensive real estate and property datasets on the market. ATTOM’s API consolidates nationwide property-centric deed, tax, mortgage and foreclosure data with neighborhood data on schools, crime, and the wider community. The API offers data on more than 155 million U.S. properties and 99% of the U.S. population.
With no commitments, you can arrange a test drive – with access to ATTOM’s knowledge base and developer sandbox. A technical support team professional is personally assigned to help guide you through the process and make sure you get the most out of the application.
Top Real Estate APIs
Every year, more and more real estate APIs enter the market. The best real estate API for you depends on your budget, business needs, and technical proficiency. Keep our list of five of the leading APIs on the market when you start to narrow down your options
Curious to try our leading real estate API? Arrange a free demo with our team here.
