Zillow Real Estate API

For our group project we wanted to provide some housing statistics for people who were looking to relocate.The API that we chose to do this was the Zillow API which is a real estate API that allows you to do all kinds of searches for housing information in different areas. The types of info I was looking for was median home prices as well as other pertinent info. I used the following URL to get the data:

$zip = $_REQUEST['zipID'];
$url = 'http://www.zillow.com/webservice/GetDemographics.htm?zws-id=X1-ZWz1c2hu5r9fd7_5f91a&zip=';
$fullUrl = $url.$zip;

This basically provides a XML output that I used to grab the data. Below is the output from the query.

Once I had the data I then grabbed the Zip code returned as well as all of the attribute tags and its child tags. I did this withe the following code.

$zip = $xml->xpath('/Demographics:demographics/response/region/zip/text()');

$attr = $xml->xpath('//attribute');

Once I had all of the attribute tags into the array I was able to access them by using a for loop in order to iterate through all of them and return them back to the Javascript code and finally to the users browser.

for($i=0; $i<10;>name
echo $attr[$i]->values->zip->value[0]
echo $attr[$i]->values->nation->value[0]
}

You can see that the Xpath methods use a object type of structure to access the child nodes. The -> denotes a child node and once you know the path you can traverse all of the tags. For instance the query echo $attr[$i]->values->zip->value[0] is used to access the following data:



Once you have grabbed all of the data you can simply use a series of echos from the PHP script to send the data to the Javascript in a nicely formated string.



Anyway, the final output looks like this. I is not to fancy but it provides the data necessary.