NOTE: Zillow deprecated their API on 2021-09-30, and this package is now deprecated as a result.

ZillowR

Zillow, an online real estate company, provides real estate and mortgage data for the United States through a REST API. The ZillowR package provides an R function for each API service, making it easy to make API calls and process the response into convenient, R-friendly data structures. See https://www.zillow.com/howto/api/APIOverview.htm for the Zillow API Documentation.

Installation and setup

Install the latest stable version from CRAN as follows.

install.packages('ZillowR')

Alternatively, if you’ve installed the devtools package, you can install the latest development version directly from GitLab.

devtools::install_gitlab('fascinatingfingers/zillowr')

Each subscriber to Zillow Web Services is uniquely identified by an ID sequence, and every request to Web Services requires this ID. After loading the ZillowR package, you should set the “ZillowR-zws_id” option as shown below. This facilitates API calls without needing to specify your Zillow Web Services ID every time.

Click here to register with Zillow and receive your own Web Services ID.

Basic usage

ZillowR provides an eponymous function for each Zillow API service, with API parameters as function arguments. For example:

GetMonthlyPayments(price = 300000L)
#> $request
#> $request$price
#> [1] "300000"
#>
#>
#> $message
#> $message$text
#> [1] "Request successfully processed"
#>
#> $message$code
#> [1] "0"
#>
#>
#> $response
#> <response>
#>  <payment loanType="thirtyYearFixed">
#>   <rate>3.537</rate>
#>   <monthlyPrincipalAndInterest>1082</monthlyPrincipalAndInterest>
#>  </payment>
#>  <payment loanType="fifteenYearFixed">
#>   <rate>2.709</rate>
#>   <monthlyPrincipalAndInterest>1624</monthlyPrincipalAndInterest>
#>  </payment>
#>  <payment loanType="fiveOneARM">
#>   <rate>2.913</rate>
#>   <monthlyPrincipalAndInterest>1000</monthlyPrincipalAndInterest>
#>  </payment>
#>  <downPayment>60000</downPayment>
#> </response>

Each function returns a named list with the following elements:

  • “request” a list with the request parameters
  • “message” a list of status code(s) and message(s) returned by the API
  • “response” an XMLNode with the API-specific response values. At this time, no further coercion is performed, so you may have to use functions from the XML package to extract the desired output.

Be sure to check out the API documentation to learn more about the available services