Can You Still Get Zillow Zestimate API Access? Here Is How to Get Zestimates Without It

Yes, you can get Zestimates through an API without Zillow approving you. Scavio's Zillow API takes a zpid or listing URL on /api/v1/zillow/property and returns that home's Zestimate, Rent Zestimate, last sale and dated price history, and its search endpoint returns every listing under a price cap in a city, about 41 a page. You sign up, get a key and call it the same day. Each call costs 1 credit, about $0.002 on the Growth plan billed yearly.

The question has been on r/RealEstateTechnology since 2024, and with 52 comments it still ranks second on Google for "zillow api". The poster wanted Zestimates API access for an app that shows what houses you could buy in a given state with a given amount of bitcoin, and asked for a free alternative if Zillow said no. The top reply described Zillow moving its APIs to Bridge Interactive and a "manual approval process" that repeats every year or two. Both halves of the app, the listings under a budget and the value of each home, are two calls.

What Zillow itself offers

Zillow Group's Zestimates API returns property, rental and foreclosure Zestimates for about 100 million US homes. The page says it "is really for commercial use cases by businesses", you request access through a form, it authenticates with a password and access token, and no price is published. Research and academic projects are pointed to Zillow's Research data, which is market-level indexes by region, not a value per home. Listings are separate again: the MLS Listings API is invite-only and each MLS partner decides. If your business qualifies and can wait, that is the licensed route. A side project like the one in the thread usually does not.

Step 1: Find the homes under a budget

curl -s https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/zillow/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCAVIO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"location": "Phoenix, AZ", "max_price": 400000, "home_type": "houses", "sort": "newest"}'

On October 27, 2026 this returned 41 of 1,135 Phoenix houses listed at or under $400,000, newest first, each with price, address, beds, baths, square footage, coordinates and days on Zillow. Convert your user's bitcoin balance to dollars, pass it as max_price, and loop over cities for a state. Two things to handle:

• Auctions: 13 of the 41 rows were auction listings with price 0 and listing_sub_type {"for_auction": true}. Drop them or show them separately, or they will look like free houses.
• Zestimate on the row: 12 rows carried a zestimate, mostly the auctions. 3208 W Willow Avenue was listed at $325,000 against a Zestimate of $321,200. For the rest, call property detail.

Step 2: Get the Zestimate for each home

curl -s https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/zillow/property \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCAVIO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"zpid": "13288820"}'

The captured response for a Denver house, trimmed to the valuation fields:

{
  "zpid": "13288820",
  "home_status": "FOR_SALE",
  "price": 1350000,
  "price_per_square_foot": 368,
  "zestimate": 1330900,
  "rent_zestimate": 5376,
  "last_sold_price": 1600000,
  "date_sold": "2024-07-02T00:00:00.000Z",
  "price_history": [
    { "date": "2026-09-24", "price": 1350000 },
    { "date": "2026-08-27", "price": 1499900 },
    { "date": "2026-07-16", "price": 1550000 }
  ]
}

The asking price sat 1.4% above the Zestimate, and the 17-point price history shows it listed at $1,750,000 in March. zpid also accepts a full Zillow listing URL. Expect gaps: a Phoenix house listed that day came back with zestimate null, because Zillow had not published one yet.

Step 3: Sold homes, if you need what buyers actually paid

Set listing_status to sold on search and each row carries the sale price and sale date, usually with the Zestimate. Denver returned 41 sales from October 23 to 26 with a price on every one and a Zestimate on 40. In Texas the same search returns no sale prices, since it is a non-disclosure state. The best Zillow property data APIs post charts sold price per square foot across six cities.

What it costs for an app like this

Refreshing one search for each of 20 cities every day is about 600 calls a month, and looking up the Zestimate on 500 homes adds 500: 1,100 credits, about $2.20 at the Growth-yearly rate of $2 per 1,000, and inside the $30 Project plan's 7,000 credits. The 50 free credits on signup cover a working prototype. Searches took 1 to 11 seconds and property calls 4 to 18 seconds in our test, so cache Zestimates rather than fetching them on every page view.

Try the Zillow API free, 50 credits, no card, try a few addresses in the free bulk Zestimate lookup, or test the endpoints in the playground.

Reference: Zillow API overview · property docs · search docs · how to get Zillow property data