Top 10 Real Estate APIs for Building Proptech Apps in the U.S. Market

Gartner’s API Strategy Survey for 2024 reveals that 71% of digitized organizations use APIs provided by third parties, such as SaaS vendors. API (Application Programming Interface) integrations are especially popular in real estate software development because they allow proptech companies to accelerate product development, reduce the cost of projects, and provide excellent customer experience with relevant features and up-to-date property information.

Instead of building particular functionality from scratch or hosting their own databases, real estate companies can use APIs to quickly get access to useful proptech features and relevant real estate databases.

What APIs to choose for your product? In this article, we enumerate the 10 best real estate API integrations for the U.S. market.

APIs are universal solutions for expanding the app’s functionality. But what are the main benefits of API integration in real estate software development? Here is the list including the most notable proptech API benefits.

Simply put, real estate APIs help you get access to new features without developing them from scratch. Building a feature from scratch is a time-consuming process that may require much cost and effort. Meanwhile, API allows you to pay a subscription fee, which is mostly affordable, to connect with a pre-built feature. Similar principle applies to databases. Proptech apps can access existing MLS services, which means that real estate companies don’t need to create their own databases or craft some complex ways for retrieving data from real property databases. Therefore, APIs bring substantial cost to proptech software development.

Real estate API integrations speed up software development by providing access to ready-to-use features of other platforms. Most such APIs are simple to integrate and can smoothly connect your solution to the functionality or extensive databases of different real estate platforms. This saves much time because developers don’t need to spend time writing functionality or configuring databases from scratch. Integrations through APIs allow the team to implement a variety of features in a proptech app, including property search, market analysis, tax and fee calculation, etc.

APIs can also help development teams integrate real estate apps with AI solutions that bring a variety of promises. In particular, Gartner estimates that more than 30% of the increase in demand for application programming interfaces (APIs) will come from AI and tools using large language models (LLMs) by 2026. Many businesses, including real estate companies, are eager to leverage the benefits of customer communication automation, improved analytics and decision-making, automated documentation processing, and powered property calculation covered by AI solutions.

With real estate API integration, you will get up-to-date property data. Such APIs enable your app to get direct access to real-time listings, market trends, and pricing information. Such a solution retrieves information from vast real estate datasets, ensuring accurate and current information for property searches and analytics. For example, if you connect your proptech app to an MLS listing of properties, you will get updates on real estates each time the MLS is updated. The image below shows how Leobit can integrate an API (here presented as a Leobit API) with a listing to ensure regular proptech app data updates.

API for real estate also helps you unlock other relevant technologies and features, such as property investment potential calculation, tax information research, location analysis, etc.

Various APIs integrated with a real estate application can provide you with access to analytical features. Such solutions help you get market insights for a real estate app by providing real-time data on property prices, trends, neighborhood statistics, and real estate market dynamics. These integrations can also help you leverage advanced analytics and predictive models, enhancing your decision-making and boosting your business management efficiency.

Now, let’s get straight to the point and discuss the most promising proptech APIs enabling you to access useful functionality and real estate datasets. The APIs from this list can serve different purposes and types of proptech software. Here we collected integration options that bring real estate businesses the biggest value, have the highest usability ratings in the U.S. software development market, and have been implemented by our team members throughout various proptech development projects.

ATTOM is a large property search platform for the U.S. market. Integration with the ATTOM’s real estate API ensures proptech app’s integration with data on properties, neighborhoods, environmental data, tax and cost trends, and other information useful to both investors and real estate agents. ATTOM provides information on over 155 million U.S. properties. In brief, integrations through ATTOM API offers the following features:

• Data from multiple sources, such as county assessor, real estate agents, recorder offices, etc.
• Property data details, recent home sales history, owner and mortgage details, and other important information on properties
• Information on neighborhoods, including school attendance zones, points of interest in the area, and community data, such as crime rates, population, weather stats, and commuter times.

Mind that ATTOM offers only a 30-day free trial for using its API. Once the trial is over, users can choose among the available paid subscription plans.

Zillow is a platform that offers extensive real estate listings and a wide range of property data. It provides the collection of around 20 APIs and datasets including data on over 100 million properties across the U.S. Real estate software development teams can use Zillow’s real estate data API solutions to get information on mortgages, MLS listings, and public data for property estimates and transactions.

By using several different Zillow APIs, development teams can integrate the following features into their apps:

• Information from public records, user-submitted data, multiple listing services (MLS), and proprietary algorithms
• Property details data, such as home values, rental prices, mortgage rates
• Home valuation presented as a Zestimate (Zillow’s estimated market value)
• Neighborhood data, including data on population, crime rates, climate, etc.
• Mortgage information, such as mortgage rates and affordability calculators

Some of the APIs provided by Zillow are free, but more advanced features unlocked with specific Zillow APIs have particular fees.

Estated API is a solution that seamlessly integrates with diverse proptech applications to provide them with access to real estate data. The tool offers information on 150+ million properties across the United States. Estated also provides relevant documentation and instructions helping integrate their API with proptech apps more efficiently. With such an integration, proptech software developers can implement the following features in their app:

• Access to listings with detailed property information, including images and all critical parameters
• Information on current and past property owners, property taxes and valuation
• Geographical data and neighborhood information
• Foreclosure information on properties
• Legal information on different properties.

Estated API is very efficient and simple to integrate but it is not free. The tool offers several subscription plans that differ by the number of API requests, precision of property description, customization features, and levels of support provided.

MLS (Multiple Listings Service) is one of America’s biggest selections of real estate listings. Most proptech solutions for real estate agents or customers searching for properties integrate with MLS listings to provide up-to-date property lists. The MLS Router API simplifies the integration with different MLS lists corresponding to different U.S. states. This integration offers real-time real estate data, such as:

• Detailed lists of properties for different states, regions, counties, and residential areas
• Extensive lists of property photos
• Property mortgage rates and tax-related information
• Information on agents related to the property.

The MLS Router real estate listing API allows developers to feed this information to analytical scripts, gaining valuable insights that help real estate companies and their customers make informed decisions.

This property information and search platform offers a variety of APIs serving lenders, realtors, IT developers, and contractors. It provides access to the features of several products provided by Homesage.ai, such as investment potential measurement, short-term rental ROI calculation, price flexibility score, deal value estimation, property renovation cost, etc.

Mostly, it goes about finance-related data, which is calculated by Homesage’s AI scripts. Such APIs, both free and paid, allow real estate companies to add creative AI-based features to a proptech app. The list of the main features that become accessible through such integrations includes:

• Property data, including history, images, price dynamics
• Short-term and long-term rental information
• Valuable data on the neighborhood, including crime rates, population, school ratings
• Property development and renovation estimates
• Estimates on property investment potential, such as FLIP ROI, estimated value increases, price flexibility scores, short-term rental ROI, etc.
• RE, short/long term rental ROI, property condition, ARV.

Mind that Homesage.ai is rather expensive. It offers several pricing plans based on usage and features. The basic plan costs $200 per month, which includes 500 requests and offers features such as renovation cost estimation, short and long-term rental values, investment potential, and more. The pro plan costs $500 per month and provides 2,500 requests, while the ultra plan costs $1,000 per month and includes 10,000 requests​.

Taxee is a property tax calculation platform. The integration with its API helps real estate companies include accurate cost and tax estimates in a proptech application. The Taxee API provides access to up-to-date tax rate information for the United States. This information is relevant to real estate agents, property buyers, and investors and can serve a wide range of real estate software solutions. Basically, integration with Taxee offers:

• Up-to-date federal, state, and local tax rates
• Tax rates for all states in the U.S. and many local jurisdictions
• An accurate tax calculator ensuring compliance.

The extent of functionality provided by this API might not look too impressive, but it is simple to integrate and provides the most accurate tax information in a real estate application. The API’s free version offers a limited number of tax information requests. Meanwhile, this number is unlimited in a paid Taxee API plan.

Mashvisor is another property information platform that provides a popular API for real estate software development. Mashvisor’s API allows developers access to the endpoints required for integrating a proptech app with the rich real estate databases of Mashvisor. This integration allows real estate companies to get information on properties, including estimates, valuations, and analytics. In sum, the main features gained through integrating the Mashvisor API with a proptech app are:

• Comprehensive property information, including dep analysis and zip codes
• Calculations on property prices and pricing dynamics, investment potential, rental rates, property incomes
• Information on neighborhoods
• Mortgage calculator
• Integration with Airbnb listings
• General information about trending cities in terms of property rent and purchase.

Mashvisor API for real estate offers different subscription plans that provide a proptech app with different access levels and data volumes. All pricing tiers serve different user groups, ranging from individual investors to large real estate companies. In some cases, the company offers free trial periods for its API.

RentCast is a large rental portfolio management and property search platform working in the U.S. market. Its real estate data API is especially useful to real estate businesses that specialize in rental services. By integrating a proptech solution with RentCast databases, real estate businesses get information on property records, rental valuation estimates, and active listings for over 140,000 properties across the U.S., and important insights on real estate market trends.

The feature set unlocked with such an integration includes:

• Data from various sources, including public records, MLS feeds, listing aggregators, lists of both for-sale and for-rent properties
• Information on property history, taxation history, past sales, and information on a current owner
• Accurate rental estimates
• Historical rent trends, listing and composition statistics by zip code, etc.

Typically for the market of real estate APIs, RentCast offers several subscription models. The company offers a free Developer plan, which allows up to 50 API requests per month at no cost. RentCast also offers paid plans with fixed monthly prices and per-request overage fees.

WolfNet is a platform that provides real estate agents with access to the most notable MLS across all the U.S. states and Canada. A development team can integrate a proptech app with this platform through the WoflNet API. As a result, the app will be enhanced with access to a range of real estate datasets and services, including MLS data, property listings, market analytics, and more. Developers can use WolfNet’s APIs to enhance their applications with up-to-date real estate information and features.

The list of features unlocked through such an integration includes:

• Access to a comprehensive collection of MLS listings with a real estate listing API
• Tools for capturing and managing real estate business leads
• Advanced IDX search engine
• A structured information system for managing real estate agents, clients, and properties
• Mechanics for secure data exchange
• Efficiency property search tools

WolfNet offers a subscription-based pricing model. It varies based on the level of access and the specific features required for developing a proptech app. The cost will depend on factors such as the number of MLS data feeds needed, the volume of data access, and additional services like lead management, mapping, or market analytics.

The integration with this generative AI service is not specific to the proptech industry. However, it can help real estate businesses gain the advantages of OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs). With Azure OpenAI integration, developers can build AI-powered employees capable of handling customer communication. This experience can be transferred to the real estate software industry. Many proptech companies integrate their solutions with large language models capable of processing requests, analyzing data, and providing informative responses to both real estate agents and customers. All large language models can be trained and fine-tuned in order to conform to corresponding needs.

The list of features unlocked with such an integration might be vast and depend on how the development team trains an LLM. Some of such features include:

• Automation for routine processes, such as documentation management, listing generation and organization
• An AI-powered tool for customer communication and email auto-response
• Support for real estate operations with AI-powered analytical scripts
• Automated request processing
• Precise calculations and estimates on property prices, investment potential, taxes, etc.

Basically, the integration with OpenAI offers a business several great benefits, such as process automation, improved customer experience, boosted innovation, and cost savings in the long run. Real estate businesses can choose other OpenAI technologies, such as Chat GPT, for this integration. The most critical benefit of Azure’s tool is that it keeps data secure by storing it on an isolated dedicated cloud, which grants that users from outside the company won’t get access to its information assets.

Real estate API integration is a great way for saving costs, boosting speed, enhancing AI/ML functionality, keeping your app data up-to-date, and enhancing decision-making through market insights during the proptech app development project. The key point is to find the most fitting real estate APIs for your specific case. We suggest reviewing the list of the most popular real estate APIs for the U.S. market outlined above.

To cover the technical side, rely on Leobit, a team with an outstanding knowledge of the real estate industry.. Our team, recognized as the top software development partner for real estate in 2023 by Clutch, is ready to tackle all the primary challenges of proptech software development. We can enhance your app with various integrations, arranged through API integration or custom script development. Contact us to find out how we can help you enhance your real estate management processes through innovative software solutions or create a new hot startup solution for the U.S. real estate market.