regardless of whether the home is for-sale, if you type any street address into zillow, redfin, or trulia, they will often tell you the square footage, the last-sold-date, the taxable value, and often some other official information. here is one example address across all three services:

http://www.redfin.com/MD/Baltimore/25-W-27th-St-21218/home/10093658 http://www.zillow.com/homes/25-west-27th-st-baltimore_rb/ http://www.trulia.com/homes/Maryland/Baltimore/sold/434549-25-W-27th-St-Baltimore-MD-21218

has anyone had any luck reproducing their underlying data? i'm not so concerned with getting up-to-the-minute home sales.. if data are a few years old, that's no problem for my purposes. it would just be nice to have basic structural data nationwide like: address square footage last sold date sale value tax assessment number of bedrooms

i suppose i could write scraping algorithms for all of the counties with recorder databases online, but did redfin/zillow/trulia all seriously show up at all of the other county recorder offices and scan things in by hand?

i found a bit of discussion, most of it makes me think this would be a massive undertaking:

here are one, two uninspiring discussion threads on the topic of where these three websites pulled these data from.

here's an eight-year-old blog post saying that pulling this information is hard.

here's a website that appears to point to all 3,000+ county recorder of deeds pages.

any advice appreciated :) thanks!!

Regardless of whether the home is for sale, if you type any street address into Zillow, Redfin, or Trulia, they will often tell you the square footage, the last-sold-date, the taxable value, and often some other official information. Here is one example address across all three services:

• http://www.redfin.com/MD/Baltimore/25-W-27th-St-21218/home/10093658
• http://www.zillow.com/homes/25-west-27th-st-baltimore_rb/
• http://www.trulia.com/homes/Maryland/Baltimore/sold/434549-25-W-27th-St-Baltimore-MD-21218

Has anyone had any luck reproducing their underlying data? I'm not so concerned with getting up-to-the-minute home sales. If data are a few years old, that's no problem for my purposes. It would just be nice to have basic structural data nationwide like: address square footage last sold date sale value tax assessment number of bedrooms

I suppose I could write scraping algorithms for all of the counties with recorder databases online, but did Redfin/Zillow/Trulia all seriously show up at all of the other county recorder offices and scan things in by hand?

I found a bit of discussion, most of it makes me think this would be a massive undertaking:

• Here are one, two uninspiring discussion threads on the topic of where these three websites pulled these data from.

• Here's an eight-year-old blog post saying that pulling this information is hard.

• Here's a website that appears to point to all 3,000+ county recorder of deeds pages.