Zillow Personal Advisor

Team name: Aliens vs Predator vs. Brown vs. Board of Education

Intro

The purpose of Zillow Personal Advisor is to provide Zillow users with a more personalized experience during their home search.

This application was developed February 6-8th, 2015 for the Hack Housing Zillow Hackathon.

Our app is live at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zillow-personal-advisor/ggkbabbeajcoacmcgobollpffemnkkll. Screenshots are here too. To install the app, just click on the "+ Free" button" and then go to Zillow.com. We integrate with the Zillow profile page and map page.

Challenge and Approach

Zillow Personal Advisor addresses many pain points for first time and lower income home buyers, such as

What houses can I afford based on my finances?
Do I qualify for any HUD loan assistance programs, and why?
Where and from who can I get more infomation on these programs?

Our approach for satisfying this challenge was to:

Build a Chrome browser extension that extends the functionality on Zillow.com to add advice based on the user's specific finances:
- Integrate with Mint to pull a user's specific financial information
- Advice based on their finances:
  - Provide max house cost that can be used to filter houses on map
- Advice based on their finances and the area they are searching for homes in:
  - Provide federal aid plans for home loans they qualify for, and why
  - Provide contact information of nearby loan assistance agents (to location they are searching for homes)
- Advice based on their finances and a specific home they are viewing:
  - Provide recommendations on specific homes

Team Members

Our team is comprised of:

* Adam Levine 
* Joe Levy
* Mason Meier
* Stephen Han

Technologies, APIs, and Datasets Utilized

We made use of: * Mint.com - scrape data from Mint site and make use of Mint's internal API to gather other information * JavaScript Chrome extension * HTTP request transformer to modify Zillow map page canvas to show houses user can afford/hide houses user can't afford * Make use of internal Zillow API to get bank interest rate based on loan amount and down payment * Active Housing Counseling Agencies API - return counseling agencies nearby and their contact info if user qualifies for HUD loan assistance programs

Building and Running

	* Clone the git repository
* Open Google Chrome
* Chrome menu: More Tools -> Extensions  
* Load Unpacked Extension
* Select file directory "src" of the cloned repository
* Enable the extension
* Go to Zillow profile page to integrate with Mint, and Zillow map page