10 months after the Minneapolis/St. Paul area MLS (RMLS of MN) made available the somewhat-useful-but-really-bastardized-lender-mediated-mls-field and 14 months after I started openly pushing for specific fields, they have now come to see the light and are redoing the fields as three separate and distinct fields that address each of the major questions/problems of lender mediated listings:
Three new required fields will be added to NorthstarMLS. (Tentatively planned for activation Tuesday night–we will let you know if that changes.)
The current “In Foreclosure/Lender Owned?” field will be replaced with two separate fields: “In Foreclosure” and “Lender Owned.” As with the current combined field, the options will be Yes, No and Not Disclosed. For current listings, both separate fields will automatically be populated with whatever you have selected for the combined field. If this is incorrect for either of the separate fields, you will need to edit it in Home Base.
If you have any Saved Searches in Matrix that include the current “In Foreclosure/Lender Owned” field, it will automatically be replaced with the single “In Foreclosure” field. If you want to add “Lender Owned” to any of your current saved searches, you will need to revise them.
NorthstarMLS continues to define “In Foreclosure” as: The homeowner being served official notice of foreclosure by a governing entity.
“Short Sale?” is our third new field. The options here are also Yes, No and Not Disclosed. Existing listings will have nothing selected for this field. If you want to make a selection, you will need to go to Home Base and edit the listing.
For NorthstarMLS, we define “Short Sale” as: A transaction where title transfers; where the sale price is insufficient to pay the total of all liens and costs of the sale; and where the seller does not bring sufficient liquid assets to the closing to cure all deficiencies.
For all three fields, you should have the seller’s signed consent for a disclosure of “Yes.” You can get this through their signature on the Listing Input Form or on a Change Form.
The new fields will also be available for broker/agent Web sites (through Broker Reciprocity) after a three week notice period for developers. Therefore, the new fields will be visible to the public.
So based on my math, by mid-May consumers searching public web sites (and agents using our proprietary system) will both be able to clearly identify & separate MOST properties as short sales, bank owned, or traditional sellers. I say most because “not disclosed” is an option for all three fields. Many will assume “not disclosed” means Yes but that will not always be the case.
At a time where lender mediated sales are full 1/2 of the sales in our market, any further detail we can use to help us parse the listings is quite welcome. The differences between foreclosed homes, short sales, and traditional sellers is huge and many buyers have specific wants/needs that dictate their need to focus on only certain types of listings.
The other great benefit is that in the coming months the reporting that MAAR and I have put out will be able to clearly differentiate between the three types of properties and produce statistics on each category of properties. This could lead to dramatic enchancements to our reports but due to the timing of the system changes we likely will not have sufficient data to make the differentiations until July or August at the earliest.
[...] RMLS of Minnesota recently revised their fields regarding foreclosures and short sales (after a year of much confusion over the old fields) and we [...]