Posts Tagged Minnesota MLS
City of Minneapolis Receives $19.5 Million for Foreclosure Help
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has awarded the City of Minneapolis $19.5 million in Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds. This money will be used to acquire, demolish or rehab foreclosed homes around the city. The city will use this money in areas hardest hit by the foreclosure housing market such as North Minneapolis.
The funds area provided by the Federal Government as grants to state and local governments as well as non-profits. These entities must compete for the limited funds available. Minneapolis submitted the application in conjunction with the Cities of Brooklyn Park and Hennepin County. Saint Paul was the only other city in Minnesota to receive grant money.
Minneapolis will used the funds to purchase and rehabilitate or demolish homes and other properties that have been foreclosed and/or abandoned. The vacant lots from the demolished properties will then be held by the city for future development. These may be sold to non-profit groups that can afford to build properties despite the decline in the housing market. Some of the funding will also be used to develop financing programs for homeowners or developers that wish to purchase and renovate foreclosed properties.
The city was awarded $14 million in similar funds in 2008. It used $12.5 million to purchase properties for renovation or demolition. $6 million of that was used to demolish vacant or foreclosed homes that the city deemed were not worthy of rehab. If you are interested in finding any foreclosed properties, you can search the Minnesota MLS on this site.
Q4 MN MLS Compliance
The MLS has many rules that real estate agents must adhere to. Some include how quickly you must post a picture on your listings to the fact that you can not have your phone number in any of the supplements in the listings. With over 15,000 Minnesota MLS subscribers, these rules help keep a level playing field and insure that everyone plays nice!
Northstar MLS sent over 8,000 compliance notices during the 4th quarter of 2009. The majority of these were for missing, incorrect or incomplete listing information. The goal is to ensure that listing data is correct and that agents/offices learn from any mistakes to avoid recurrences. They achieved 100% compliance on these notices, with less than 6% resulting in an actual fine to the listing office (for 94% of these notifications, there was no fine or the fine was waived). Typically if you get a notice from the MLS police, you snap to attention and do whatever they want!
In all seriousness though, I do appreciate the fact that they are as diligent as they are when it comes to keeping the MLS updated and accurate. Our job as real estate agents is tough and frustrating enough at times. Having mis-information in the system could be unbearable (and embarrassing for our customers).
MLS Upgrade and Outage
The Minnesota MLS was upgraded on Wednesday night with many new features including the following:
- CMA Wizard: A new and easier way to create your CMA’s step-by-step.
- Speed Bar: A quick search bar available from wherever you are in Matrix. Use it for quick shorthand searches of listings, tax records, open houses and agents. You can even create your own shortcuts!
- My Matrix and Contacts Management: Redesigned to better organize everything by client with special filters to help you work more efficiently.
- Price Search: Search for prices in “000′s” meaning you no longer need to enter the three zeros at the end. For example, to search homes in the $200,000 to $350,000 range, you will enter “200-350″ instead of “200000-350000.”
- Drop the asterisk: When searching Street Name in listings and tax records, you can drop the asterisk at the end for wild card search. The system will automatically assume it there.
- Search Criteria on PDF Reports: Your search criteria will now display at the end of any PDF Report you run. No more writing them in by hand! (Note: This is currently available in Single Family and Multi-Family, except the ”Comprehensive Report” and will be configured for the other property types and Comprehensive Report later today.)
Unfortunately, the upgrade does not appear to have go so well. Users of the MN MLS experienced a 4 hour outage on Thursday afternoon of various parts of the MLS system including Homebase, which is used to upload new home listings and make changes. Today we have experienced another complete outage of the entire system for about 2 hours starting at 11:00 am.
I firmly believe these upgrades will be worth the pain, but it would be nice to have the outages limited to the night time. Being a former IT Director myself, I can understand the stress level of the computer department at the NorthstarMLS!
Tax Data Added to Northstar MLS from 8 Additional Counties
Posted on the Northstar MLS on Tuesday, January 20, 2009
We are pleased to report that we now have tax data on NorthstarMLS directly from 8 additional counties: Blue Earth (Mankato), Kanabec (Mora), McLeod (Hutchinson/Winsted), Meeker (Litchfield), Mille Lacs (Milaca), Nicollet (North Mankato/St. Peter), St. Louis (Duluth/Hibbing) and Wabasha.
The value of Tax Data within NorthstarMLS:
- This brings our total to 28 counties (25 Minnesota and 3 Wisconsin) where we obtain the most complete tax data available directly from the counties. Open the tax record by clicking the PID Number directly from the Property Full Display for any listing in these counties. Also searchable through the Tax tab.
- Winona and Le Sueur Counties to be added soon.
- We continually work with the counties where we already have data to add additional fields and improve the quality of the data. Data from sales records (CREVs) are added daily.
- Northstar MLS also has basic tax record data for all Minnesota counties, obtained from the MN State Dept of Revenue. This information is searchable through the Tax tab.
- GIS and Plat maps from REsearch Minnesota are available for the core metro counties through a simple click on the links within the tax displays.
- Tax/Valuation History and Sales History also available through links on the tax displays.
- Use Matrix MLS to run reports, mailing labels and export data all from the tax records.
The 2009 updates to the tax data will start as soon as they are made available to us from the counties, usually starting in March/April.