How APIs Are Changing The Real Estate Game

Data has always been incredibly important to real estate organizations. Early on, agents relied a lot more on their memories to match buyers with property listings.  Plus everything was manual so the real estate office had to manage many filing cabinets of customer records, property listings and so on.

The real estate industry’s data management practices have evolved over the years and now you’d be hard pushed to find an agent who is not tech-savvy.  The industry is online with databases in the cloud and software that can manipulate large quantities of information. Homebuyers search online and use their smartphones to communicate with agents.

However, the need for more data has given rise to more feature-rich apps empowering users as well as organizations in the real estate industry to respond quicker and with more accuracy.  This hunger for more data does throw up a host of new challenges one being the speed of access.  This is where APIs have stepped up and as such their use is making it easier for agents to navigate this brave new world of apps and online services.

So where are API’s making it easier for Real Estate Agents?  Read on for the two areas we believe are seeing a big turn around in customer response times.

Managing Listings

The best options in this list of property APIs are those who focus on overhauling the way that agents handle property listings allowing them to engage with prospective buyers more directly while also edging out the competition.

Platforms like market-leader Zillow offer custom APIs to allow for listings to be added, updated, altered and removed either manually or automatically. Taking advantage of Multiple Listing Services, which is effectively a central database from which listing information can be sourced and then added to several property sites simultaneously, gives more power to every organization and individual involved in the buying and selling process.

There are several benefits to this, aside from the fact that listings can be rolled out in a unified way to ensure maximum exposure. For example, APIs also help when the time comes to take down expired listings, meaning that they will not linger long after a sale has been completed or some other circumstance caused the property to be pulled from the market.

All of this helps to save agents a lot of time and money because while APIs do allow for manual listing interactions, they can also be harnessed with a degree of automation baked in.

Researching properties

It is essential for agents to have a fairly in-depth overview of the history of any property they hope to sell, but searching up all of the relative pieces of information can be a labor-intensive task. Or at least this was the case before modern APIs became commonplace and solutions emerged to streamline the collation of data relating to a given property.

APIs like Estated have emerged to fulfil this role and deliver hundreds of different data points in a single, actionable format that will ensure no agent is in the dark about any critical aspect of the real estate that is on their radar.

Summary

Having access to accurate property data on the fly and being able to map it into an app or website is not just suitable for agents, but also essential to winning over customers. You need to be able to meet buyer expectations, offer details not only on pricing but also dimensions and layout, and generally tick all the boxes.

Users are used to an abundance of functionality in their real estate experiences today, and it is all down to the rise of APIs.