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.
Does this work with Yahoo pipes. I don’t think because it is still not a xml feed. Mashup this with Yahoo Pipes and you can do amazing things. I wish this will happen some day.
Hi Marshall,
On the “commercial use” – just to clarify. We want commercial entities to use the Trulia API, but we are saying that you cannot sell the data or charge access to the data (advertising along side the data is fine). Sorry for the confusion, we should have made this more explicit in the terms of use.
And – you’re right, the 1,000 limit is just a starting point; we’ll increase for those that need it! Just let us know if you need more.
Best
Pete
“We want commercial entities to use the Trulia API, but we are saying that you cannot sell the data or charge access to the data (advertising along side the data is fine).”
Pete – very important clarification…thanks.
“Outside developers will now have access to the company’s real estate data and aggregate user search data.”
I was really hoping that less skilled like myself would be able to take advantage or am I over estimating the process?
Great release Pete – Trulia becomes more valuable through an open API. It’ll be interesting to see the mashups that come out of it too. Though the real estate data is the most “useful” for most mashups, I find the aggregate data very compelling.
This is Roger, a software developer at Trulia.
To Adrian’s concerns: we opted for a so-called “REST” API, whereby you can get data from our API using simple URLs and get XML-formatted data back. This is much simpler than SOAP or XML-RPC–if you register an API key and build URLs per our instructions, you can view the data right in your Web browser. Extracting the data from the XML is fairly straightforward, so you should be able to enlist any geek you know to help you get started. It’s almost instant gratification–you can start displaying data in about 20 minutes!
Thanks for the interest. I look forward to seeing what folks come up with.
About Senthil’s question about Yahoo! Pipes: it would be very easy to write an RSS feed generator based on Trulia API data. Our API outputs standard XML, so you could write a simple program to pull Trulia API data, repackage the relevant bits that matter to you in RSS format, and then feed that into Yahoo! Pipes.
Thanks for the suggestion: I’ll put it on my “to-think-about” list!
For some Web 2.0 innovation in the real estate space outside the US, check out the newly launched http://www.property.com.au . Love the slider controls on the search page to refine property parameters and have the results redisplayed in place .. as well as the the integrated image display!
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