A real estate data API is a service that returns property information over HTTP so software can query it directly instead of scraping county websites or importing spreadsheets. Realie is a property data API built on public records: it collects assessor, recorder, and parcel data from more than 3,100 U.S. counties, normalizes every county into one schema, and serves it as JSON.
Property records in the United States are maintained county by county. Each of the 3,100+ counties publishes its own data, on its own schedule, in its own format, with its own field names and parcel identifiers. A real estate data API exists to absorb that fragmentation so your application does not have to. Realie collects from those county sources, normalizes the results into a single predictable schema, and exposes them through a REST API, an MCP server, a CLI, and bulk delivery. You query by address, parcel ID, owner name, or map location and get consistent JSON back regardless of which county the property sits in.
Realie is sourced from county assessor and recorder offices, so the coverage follows what those offices publish: parcel identifiers and boundaries, owner of record and owner mailing address, assessed and market values, tax records, land and building characteristics, sale and transfer history, mortgage and lien records, and zoning or land-use codes.
That is a different dataset from an MLS feed. MLS data describes properties currently for sale — list price, days on market, photographs, and the agents involved — and is licensed through real estate brokerages and associations. Realie does not provide MLS listings, listing photos, or agent contact records. If your product needs active for-sale inventory, you need an MLS or listing provider alongside a public-records API, not instead of one.
Pulling one county is easy. The difficulty is that county 1 calls a field OWNER_NAME, county 2 calls it Owner1, and county 3 splits it across three columns. Parcel ID formats differ, refresh cycles differ, and some counties publish clean exports while others publish scanned PDFs.
The value of an API in this category is almost entirely in that reconciliation work: one schema, one parcel identifier strategy, and one refresh pipeline across every jurisdiction. When you evaluate providers, ask how they handle parcel splits and merges, whether raw source values are preserved alongside normalized ones, and how quickly a county refresh reaches production.