I spent the last year building this package because there is immense value in Tidy Data. Real estate, regardless of the market, is a notoriously untransparent universe. Many of the actors in the industry benefit from this inefficency, but to me it just pisses me off and makes my life more difficult. As someone who loves data driven analysis and loathes snake-oil salesman esque practices I want code that gives me what I want to make decisions or have fun explorations.
As a general rule of thumb, putting aside legality and whole host of other things, if data lives on the web, regardless of the form, it can be turned into an API of sorts by a person with enough technical proficiency and an idea of how to connect the data together. That is essentially what I have done with this package.
I wanted a package where in one place I could access, link, explore and visualize the data across the spectrum. This could include everything from the entire New York City zoning data-store to the ability to read any document recorded against a specific lot and block, to being able to monitor condo offerings, and even keeping tabs on my favorite creature in the real estate universe, the real estate broker.
I also wanted to make the data friendly to outside APIs, everything from Gooogle Street View to some of my other R packages like fundManageR.
Finally and most importantly, I wanted to make sure the package had easy to use verbs that a person not programming-language proficent could understand and use when I am providing access to this package.
After alot of work and digging for every possible New York real estate data focused silo I am happy to write this to demonstrate what this package can do!