If you're a real estate agent and you need to build a website or an app, you have two options: buy from a vendor, or build your own. Either way, you need your real estate board's listing data, and you need to be compliant with it.
As a non-developer, I've dabbled with two real estate API's (Application Programming Interface) to build real estate websites and apps: Repliers and PropTx's RESO API.
If you're vibe coding your own real estate app (or if you're an experienced developer getting started in real estate apps), I'll give you my simple take on these two.
If you want quick, easy, works out-of-the box, go with Repliers. As someone who has never worked with real estate API's before, my prompt to my AI coding agent looked something like this:
Me: Do you know what the Repliers API is?
AI: Yes... it's... (and it gives me an explanation of what it is lol)
Me: Great -- let's build a real estate website with a listings gallery and a compliant VOW component so users can see sold data.
AI: Ok.
Yes, you do have to understand the nuances of real estate data, what things are classified as, how things are specified, terminologies, etc. because things can go wrong, and you actually need to spend a bit of time learning the ins-and-outs of the API to get what you want out of it. But here's a shortcut: I literally took examples from Repliers' documentation and fed it into my vibe coding agent and it just learned from it.
You do have to pay for this convenience and ease of use, but the build time is a lot faster and they have a lot of features and options. (And they currently power some pretty big websites of brokerages you've probably heard of already.)
If you want to use the real estate board's RESO API (which is included with your board membership, and you don't pay anything for it), the experience is a bit different. Their API queries (nerd talk) are structured differently. You have to 'replicate' historical data. And you've got to wrestle with the listings images CDN (to date I haven't perfected my own processes for this).
But you still get the listings. And it eventually does the same thing. I'm going to cover more details about these two in later posts as I guide you through my most recent build.