I’ve posted some of my ideas in the past on what could be created using the Zillow API (here and here), so this is another “idea” post along the same lines. While there are certainly some great WordPress plug-ins for real estate sites, I haven’t seen any that address the desire of local buyers, sellers, and owners to learn more about the neighborhoods and cities in their area of interest. Keeping that in mind, the fact that Zillow has released neighborhood boundaries and has real estate, home, and demographic data at the neighborhood and city level freely accessible via the Zillow API, here are a few ideas:
Idea 1 — Many blog readers might not necessarily know the exact city or neighborhood they are interested in, but know that they want to learn more about some new areas. Give the blog reader the option to select a city from a list (or search for a city), and then, if we have neighborhood data for that city, give the reader a drop-down box to select a particular neighborhoods (we currently have data on over 7,000 neighborhoods). You could create an entire page with charts and data about the neighborhood or city – everything that is on our local pages could be pulled into your WordPress blog via the GetDemographics API.
Idea 2 — To accommodate a home buyer who has narrowed their choices to several neighborhoods or cities, and now wants to compare them, you can highlight 2 (or 3 or 4) neighborhoods and display all the data side-by-side so that people can quickly evaluate them. I’ll leave it to the developers to figure out the details regarding what data from the GetDemographics call is best utilized in a comparison plug-in and how it gets displayed.
Idea 3 — Let the blog author select a list of neighborhood and/or cities they want to create “pages” for in WordPress. These pages could then be linked from the sidebar or header of the blog. To give the pages a little more of a personal feel, a neighborhood description or review by the blogger and integrating photos from Flickr would both be great additions to the page.
Idea 4 — I think this idea is pretty self-explanatory — create a neighborhood heatmap application integrated into WordPress by combining Zindex values and Zillow’s neighborhood polygons.
All of this data is 100% free to you as long as you follow Zillow’s branding requirements. If there are some really compelling plug-ins developed with our API, we’ll consider adding them to Zillow Labs (and perhaps sending you some SWAG).
Happy PHP coding!