Data, tools, and API's for Property Data

[Christian Hubbs]

Hi everyone,

I am wondering where you go for your data. I'm looking into multi-family units in Pittsburgh and I've been working with the Zillow API using the ZillowR package but keep running into a 501 error (Protected data is unavailable through API) with the `GetUpdatedPropertyDetails` function which returns critical info like price, number of bedrooms, number of units, etc. I would like to build a tool that will find properties that fit my criteria in a given region, then return some of the profitability metrics, sensitivity analysis, and so forth to help me quickly find suitable investment opportunities and return that into a nice report. If the data is available through the Zillow API, it's rather straightforward, but - in Pittsburgh at least - a lot of these properties have data protected. 

As long as API's are available, I'd like to avoid a scraping solution like this one, but maybe will have to go down that path and simply be careful about my requests. Also, I've looked into the Quandl API but have found the documentation to be terribly out of date making it very difficult to use in an automated fashion. 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!