Hi Team,
With the the Zillow API no longer active, anyone find another way to pull in home values?
Thank you,
Brandon
My process is 100% manual but not terribly painful. I have a short list of things to do on the first day of the month: grease the treadmill, add enzymes to the drains, check my FICO score and update my Zillow price in Tiller.
I manually created an account or my condo and then grabbed the price from Zillow.
Now, on the 1st of every month:
I grab the new price
I copy the transaction line from the first of last month
Change the date, update with the Zillow price
And I’m good for a month.
4 Likes
Similar here, without the treadmill and the enzymes. I do a manual account update with the latest Zillow value once a week or two. Seems like it would be possible to do a web scrape from Zillow, Redfin, Trulia or Realtor, (Ideally I’d love to scrape them all and then do an average) but Googling around I didn’t see anyone with pre-made scripts to do that, so I’m guessing it isn’t as easy as it sounds.
That would be very cool!
Great workflow @susandennis!
I’m curious, do you feel that the manual update in the Balance History sheet by copying / pasting the row from last month is easier/better than using the Tiller Money Feeds add-on to update the balance manually? Just an interesting user experience choice 
Actually it’s pretty much 6 of 1/half dozen of the other. But probably slicker to do it your way I just need to remember next month.
I use the manual account update for my Zillow and KBB accounts. It’s painless enough.
Here’s a script you can add to your sheet to update based on Zestimate. This script will not add it to your “Balance History Sheet”, but instead adds it to a sheet called “Zillow”. (You’ll need to create that sheet if you haven’t already). Use this if you’re just looking to track separately and don’t have a manual account to track the property, or you just want to write your own formulas to have fun with the data.
Google Sheets Zillow Import Script (github.com)
Follow the instructions in the first comment if you just have one, I added a comment below to handle multiple zillow properties.
Here is a script that will handle adding it to your Balance History sheet, but you need to be sure to replace everything that has percent signs in the scripts with your actual info. It assumes you already have a manual account set up that you want to update. I haven’t decided on a way to make this work for multiple properties yet, so this works with just one for now.
Zillow Tiller Sheets Importer with balance history (github.com)
Of course, the magic is in adding the script to the script triggers to make it run weekly/monthly/on open/whatever. Anyways, let me know if you have any issues. I hope this helps or gets you pointed in the right direction.
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Now that’s an interesting idea, grabbing from multiple sites and grabbing the average price. I’ll see what I can do…
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I also update it manually. One of my accounts requires two factor authentication to update so I do both mid-month and at the end of the month.
Well folks, we had a good run. Looks like Zillow now has a Captcha “Are you a robot?” check on the page and the script is certainly a robot so it looks like my scripts won’t work anymore. 
Can you get Zillow to send you an regular email with the updated home value?
If so, you can write a script to scrape the email and send it to a Google Sheet.
Here is a basic sort of concept from @benlcollins
https://www.benlcollins.com/apps-script/extract-email-from-gmail/
I don’t see an option on Zillow to get anything like that unfortunately.
@jpfieber I found this: https://www.zillow.com/sellerlanding/yourhomereport/
I haven’t received it yet so I’m not sure what the output will be. If it’s a PDF the above won’t work, but if it’s just text in an email the email parser script option would work.
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It seems like people are getting Zillow APIs and Zillow is slowly providing access. I requested access but I dont want to wait for them so in the meantime I was hoping to do something similar with Redfin but Im stuck. Would you be able to take a look and see where I went wrong. I have little to no experience scripting. Thanks in advance
I’ve played with scraping in the past but not had good success since websites frequently change and require reworking how you find the data. Since I’m not so strong with Javascript, I decided not to play instead of constantly reworking it.
Hi @rshahk , In case you want to try a different route, I’ve been using a script-free solution for most of this year without issue and what I do is the following:
- Copy the public facing web address for the property that you’re interested in and paste it into an empty cell.
- Obtain the Full Xpath that will be used by the Google Sheets function IMPORTXML. You can do this by highlighting the property value on the webpage in the Chrome browser and right-click “Inspect”. Once the page html opens with the value highlighted in the html code, right-click again and use menu Copy–>Copy full XPath. Paste that string again in an empty cell.
- Use the IMPORTXML formula to pull the property estimated value on-demand using those two key inputs. I like to use a checkbox as an activator because I only want to fetch the value when I’m ready and not send unnecessary requests. I copy the value into another cell and undo the checkbox when I’m done.
This method definitely has it’s limitations, but may serve your needs if you’re not trying to pull a lot of information. It really only saves a few minutes of clicking the weblink and manually recording a value but I like the savings.
@jpfieber is correct that the websites change a lot and this method will eventually inevitably fail, but I’ve had a good run of several months so far, and with any luck the next iteration just requires a minor adjustment to the xpath.
The following screenshot is a generic example with a made-up property name based on Zillow but I was just able to do the same on Redfin as well.
I tried this using this path for Zillow - /html/body/div[1]/div/div[2]/div/div[1]/div[2]/div/div[1]/div[2]/div[2]/div[3]/div/div/div/ul/li[4]/div/div[2]/div[1]/div[1]/div/div/div/div[1]/div/div[2]/div[1]/div/p/h3 and /html/body/div[1]/div/div[2]/div/div[1]/div[2]/div/div[1]/div[2]/div[2]/div[2]/div/div[1]/span/span[3]/span/span
It works on Redfin tho!
Both are returning NA - “Imported content is empty”
Not sure what I’m doing wrong…
Was planning on trying this then converting it to a Script for it to do it automatically and if there is an error send an email
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You can try this from the screenshot for Zillow:
/html/body/div[1]/div[6]/div[1]/div[1]/div/div/div[1]/div/div/div[1]/div[2]/div[2]/div[2]/div/div[1]/span/span[2]/span/span
I get the same error 
…so weird