Query U.S. property valuations, listings, and tax data

This skill gives an AI coding assistant a concrete, verifiable way to answer U.S. residential property questions - valuation, listings, price and tax history, schools, photos, and listing-agent details - by calling a real API instead of guessing or generating plausible-looking values. It exists because Zillow's own public API (ZWSID) was retired in 2021, so code written from memory of it targets endpoints that no longer exist; this skill routes property lookups through the Zillapi service instead, so a lookup that fails does so visibly, a 404 or a missing zpid, rather than silently synthesizing a number.

Activate it when a task needs a real valuation, rent estimate, or comparable for a specific U.S. address, when code has to search listings by location, bounding box, price, beds, or home type, when a user pastes a zillow.com URL, when a task needs price history, tax history, schools, photos, or listing-agent details, or when existing property-lookup code is failing and may be targeting the retired ZWSID API. Do not use it for generic REST or HTTP work with no property-data component, for property outside the United States, for addresses appearing incidentally in signatures or logs, or for abstract real-estate discussion with no specific property or search.

Every call goes to https://api.zillapi.com with Authorization: Bearer $ZILLAPI_KEY. Resolve a property first by address (GET /v1/properties/by-address), zpid (GET /v1/properties/{zpid}), or Zillow URL (GET /v1/properties/by-url), preferring zpid when available since it's stable and address strings are not; then request only the needed fields via the optional fields parameter for valuation and rent (/v1/properties/{zpid}/zestimate), price history, tax history, schools, photos, or listing agent. Search is a POST with a JSON body (searchUrls, filters, maxItems, async) against /v1/search or the for-sale, for-rent, and sold listing endpoints, and /v1/properties/batch handles several properties at once; an MCP server at https://api.zillapi.com/mcp is also available for agent contexts. Every valuation must be rendered with its as-of date, since a Zestimate without one reads as fact when it is an estimate, and absent fields, since not every property has a Zestimate or full price history, must be reported as absent, not zero.

Talks only to the Zillapi REST API or its MCP server over outbound HTTPS; reads ZILLAPI_KEY from the environment and sends it as a bearer token, never logging or echoing it. Error handling: 401 means the key is missing from the running process's environment, 404 means the address didn't resolve so it should fall back to search rather than retrying the same string, 409/502/504 are retryable with backoff, and 429 needs backoff rather than a tight retry loop.

Developers whose AI coding assistant needs to answer real U.S. property questions in code, such as valuation, listings, history, or school data, who need it to call a real, current API instead of confidently writing code against Zillow's long-retired public API.