Real estate search company Trulia announced the availability of its new API this morning as well as two interesting mashup examples made possible by that API. Outside developers will now have access to the company’s real estate data and aggregate user search data.
To demonstrate the types of things made possible by the API, the Trulia team made available two interesting mashups they built themselves. Plotornot (a play on HotorNot) correlates a variety of demographic information like gender, marital and income data for any state in the US. TruliaHolic (presumably a play on Alexaholic given the similarities) provides visualization of the differences in average list prices and search popularity for any city or county in the US. Real estate use of new web services is hot so I expect we’ll see any number of interesting uses of the new API on other sites.
One of the most notable things about today’s announcement is that Trulia created its API with the assistance of Mashery, the API management service we profiled here in November. Last week Mashery helped launch an API for traffic analytics service Compete and the company is working with three other companies on APIs that will be released soon.
One potentially mitigating factor is that the Trulia API is for noncommercial use only according to its terms of use. Though terms like this are often considered open for interpretation, I was disappointed to see it. Presumably though this is just a first step for the program; the company will likely increase its call limits (now only 1000 per day) and open itself to select commercial users in the future.
Trulia’s major competitors in the real estate search space include Zillow, who released APIs of their own in October, the crowd sourced My-Currency (our coverage) and a host of others. See our previous coverage of Trulia here.
Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.