Twin Cities Real Estate Blog

You can find the report here.

Background

In late October I wrote a blog post regarding foreclosures and short sales listed on the MLS in the Twin Cities. Once I started researching this topic, I found that the information I was uncovering was previously unknown in our market and that the trends it offered were very insightful. I shared this first-step research with Jeff Allen from MAAR and we decided to work together to explore it further.

The hardest part of this whole research project was developing the methodology & technique used to compile the appropriate data. Our local MLS does not have specific flags for foreclosures or short sales, so agents place myriad varieties of disclosures in the Agent, Public and Financial remarks. What’s worse, there’s no way to query all 3 fields at the same time so all the sold data had to be exported to an Access Database and queries run against that. We also had to come up with the appropriate terms. I provided Jeff a list of keywords I’ve seen used, which were then cross-checked to determine if they were reliable list of phrases. Because phrases like: “subject to bank approval” could mean a short sale or a bank owned property, we were unable to split up the data into “short sale” and “bank owned” categories.

After we had extracted the relevant properties, the next task was analyzing the data to determine what trends were evident and how they could be useful to the REALTOR membership as well as the public at large. Once we compiled these reports, we then had to submit our findings and report proposal to the MAAR Board of Directors for approval. Once we received that approval, we spent the last few weeks putting final polish on the report.

As mentioned before, here is the report. Tip of the hat to Jeff Allen @ MAAR for the excellent write-up of the analysis and to the MAAR Marketing Department for polishing up the report into something visually attractive.

Tags: bank owned, foreclosure, mls, reo, short sale, shortsale, statistics