The U.S. housing market is still in rough shape. Now there’s an API for your applications to see just how bad things are. Using the Foreclosure Listings API, you can search for homes and get details of a foreclosed home (details at our Foreclosure Listings API profile).
Their press release explains some of the API’s functionality:
The new ForeclosureListings.com API can be integrated right into an existing website by a programmer and will provide the ten latest foreclosure home listings for any zip code, city, county or state. For anyone with a real estate website, this is a great resource to have and use in conjunction with their site.
By returning only 10 results the API is limiting the types of sites developers can build. This API is not likely to help you aggregate data about a zip code or city–the sample size just isn’t large enough. However, it could help you add another layer of information to a map, for example.
The data returned by the API is enough to get a feel for the house’s location and some basic amenities. Why the latitude and longitude aren’t provided is a mystery, as that would make it even easier to plot results on a map.
In addition to the foreclosure search, there’s another potentially handy call. The isforeclosure function accepts an address and returns whether or not that home is in foreclosure.
Like many APIs, there’s a limit to the number of calls you can make, in this case you can make up to 1,000 API calls per day without contacting the company. The trade-off is that this data–which is gathered at the local level–is not available from any other API.
There are now the 13 real estate APIs in our directory. It’s a surprisingly popular niche of APIs and topic we looked at last year back when there were 7 real estate APIs in our post: What Housing Crisis?.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Related posts:
- Orbitz Uses Street View: Another Sign That Mashups Are Serious
- 28 Different APIs Used in 7 Days: From The New York Times to TwitterCounter to TwitPic
- Library Uses The New York Times API to Let You Find Most Popular Books
- New York Times Releases 5,000 Tags to the Linked Data Cloud
- The New York Times Upgrades Its Congress API – Lets You Compare Voting Records