As part of the revisions to their real estate site, Yahoo has added mortgage rate information to its search functions and returning those rates on the search results page.
Senior Engineering Manager, and Carlos Teran, Product Manager, both on the Yahoo! Real Estate team, described those, starting with the latest Yahoo Shortcut:
Go to Yahoo! and search for ‘[your city] mortgage rates’ (ex: Santa Clara mortgage rates).
The new shortcut displays three of the most popular loan types along with their daily rates and the week-over-week trend. The shortcut also has links to view nearby individual lender rates as well as state mortgage rate trend graphs. If you’re looking for a mortgage type that is not displayed, you can click the ‘More mortgage rates’ link for additional loan types. You can also select the ‘Calculate payment’ link to figure out your monthly payments and amortization schedule for your desired loan amount.
They also referenced previous updates to Real Estate. One of those paired Yahoo and Zillow.com in creating a home valuation shortcut, accessed by entering “home values” on Yahoo Search to retrieve it. Another Shortcut returns options when searching for “[city] real estate.”
Gupta and Teran also noted Yahoo Real Estate’s use of a couple of the company’s APIs to deliver enhanced results on the Real Estate site. The redesign combines satellite imagery available through Yahoo’s Maps API and information from the Yahoo Local API:
With the new design, you can easily browse homes on a map and plot nearby points of interest such as schools, grocery stores, parks, and restaurants; many of which feature user reviews from Yahoo! Local. The site also allows you to research local market conditions such as an area’s housing inventory, median price, price trends, mortgage rates, and rate trends.
Developers can also access those publicly available APIs as part of the Yahoo Developer Network.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
