Tracking home foreclosures - Cook County

[Alexandra H.]

I'm going to start tracking foreclosures in the Cook County area. I was at Al's presentation and I thought it was a great idea. I have been in touch with the group in Madison (Kurt and Constance) who have started mapping foreclosures in their area on google maps. I live in the Albany Park area and have a suspicion that there are quite a few going on in my neighborhood alone. Is there anyone in the Chicago area that would be interested in working on this with me?

[Jeff Wegerson]

I could put some time in.

[Alexandra H.]

Jeff Wegerson said:

I could put some time in.

Hi Jeff
I think the foreclosure notices come out in Monday's paper but I'm still not sure - I've been checking daily. I'm thinking about focusing on single family homes. Yesterday in the Trib I found a foreclosures sales page that had hundreds of homes and multi-unit buildings that were up for auction. This is the map that the folks in Madison are using that we can just add on to: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid...
I think after we see how the foreclosures are printed up we can just divide the list up and put them on the map.
Thanks
Alex

[Jeff Wegerson]

Alexandra H. said:

Jeff Wegerson said:

I could put some time in.

Hi Jeff
I think the foreclosure notices come out in Monday's paper but I'm still not sure - I've been checking daily. I'm thinking about focusing on single family homes. Yesterday in the Trib I found a foreclosures sales page that had hundreds of homes and multi-unit buildings that were up for auction. This is the map that the folks in Madison are using that we can just add on to: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid...
I think after we see how the foreclosures are printed up we can just divide the list up and put them on the map.
Thanks
Alex

So I will plan on finding a Monday Tribune.

[Johnny Sagan]

Let me know what I can do to help! Al Giordano just gave you a great recommendation, Alexandra. I've just opened the Madison map.

[Alexandra H.]

Johnny Sagan said:

Let me know what I can do to help! Al Giordano just gave you a great recommendation, Alexandra. I've just opened the Madison map.

Hi Johnny good to know Al is saying nice things about me. As I mentioned above I think the foreclosure notices come out tomorrow, but I will check today. I think one thing that we could do is see if there are other folks around the country that want to do the same. I've been in touch with a friend in Las Vegas who I think is going to map foreclosures there. The more people we have doing this the more powerful the map will be. I've attached the list that was in the Trib. on Friday for auction sales of foreclosed properties, as you can see there are hundreds - all over Chicago. Not sure if this happens every day or not, but will check again tomorrow. I don't know how these auctions work...

[Jeff Wegerson]

So I got a Trib and I looked for home foreclosures. I didn't find them. Can't say I was super diligent.

[Jeff Wegerson]

Google has 4,370,000,000 as in 4 billion listings for the words "home foreclosure listings".

OK so the website below says there are 6120 foreclosures in Cook County. They don't provide the exact address. They supposedly have a free 7 day trial but my guess is that they may limit how many listings you may look at. I suppose if they don't that we could set up an automated process to collect all the data in probably less than 7 days. They want credit card info even to give a 7 day trial. They might make it hard to say no thanks at the end of 7 days.

I guess what I'm suggesting is that creating a map looks doable but we would want to be totally prepared at the startup moment. Personally I would need a 4 hourish block of time to create the iMacro and test it. Then we would need a dedicated computer and internet connection to run some number of hours to collect the data and we would need someone to check in on it every couple of hours to see if it has bombed. Stuff like that.

================

--> http://www.foreclosurefreesearch.com/county?state=IL&countyNo=0...

123 pages of 50 listings each.

There is a screen scrapper macro language for firefox and there are automatic google pin pgms but it will still take some doing.

iMacros --> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863

The mapping stuff I have at home. There may be limitations on how many pins we can feed or how fast we can feed them to the google process that maps them.

The Foreclosure site above allows zipcode sorting.

Here's a sample:

DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago N Seeley Ave Unit 2I 60645 1 / 1 -
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago S Stewart 60645 0 / 0 $17,899
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago N. Hamilton Ave Unit 2A 60645 0 / 0 $54,900
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago Farwell #110 60645 1 / 0 $59,900
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago N Seeley 60645 2 / 1 $69,900
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago N Seeley Ave Unit 2A 60645 1 / 1 $76,900
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago N Kedzie Avenue 309 60645 0 / 0 $81,900
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago W Touhy Ave # 106 60645 0 / 0 $82,900
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago Seeley Avenue 3B 60645 0 / 0 $89,900
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago N Ridge Blvd 302 60645 1 / 1 $90,900
DETAILS Foreclosure Chicago West Farwell Avenue Unit 206 60645 2 / 1 $92,000

[Jeff Wegerson]

Alexandra H. said:

Johnny Sagan said:

Let me know what I can do to help! Al Giordano just gave you a great recommendation, Alexandra. I've just opened the Madison map.

Hi Johnny good to know Al is saying nice things about me. As I mentioned above I think the foreclosure notices come out tomorrow, but I will check today. I think one thing that we could do is see if there are other folks around the country that want to do the same. I've been in touch with a friend in Las Vegas who I think is going to map foreclosures there. The more people we have doing this the more powerful the map will be. I've attached the list that was in the Trib. on Friday for auction sales of foreclosed properties, as you can see there are hundreds - all over Chicago. Not sure if this happens every day or not, but will check again tomorrow. I don't know how these auctions work...

What do you open the above link with?

[Jeff Wegerson]

Will McHenery and Macon counties are the worst. Will has 1 in every 226 houses in forecloser. Cook has 1 per 313 and DuPage 1 per 441.

See shaded counties map of Illinois here: http://www.realtytrac.com/MapSearch/FreeSearch.aspx?searchType=stat...

[Alexandra H.]

Jeff Wegerson said:

Will McHenery and Macon counties are the worst. Will has 1 in every 226 houses in forecloser. Cook has 1 per 313 and DuPage 1 per 441.

I just called both the Trib and the Sun-Times and they don't publish foreclosures anymore. I found that the Daily Herald does for the suburbs: http://www.dailyherald.com/classified/results.asp?c=9974&st=b&a... (these list the names of the people being foreclosed on which is helpful in terms of organizing)
I went on the site that you just sent me and put in my zip code and it came up with close to 1000 foreclosures.
See shaded counties map of Illinois here: http://www.realtytrac.com/MapSearch/FreeSearch.aspx?searchType=stat...

[Alexandra H.]

Alexandra H. said:

Jeff Wegerson said:

Will McHenery and Macon counties are the worst. Will has 1 in every 226 houses in forecloser. Cook has 1 per 313 and DuPage 1 per 441.

I just called both the Trib and the Sun-Times and they don't publish foreclosures anymore. I found that the Daily Herald does for the suburbs: http://www.dailyherald.com/classified/results.asp?c=9974&st=b&a... (these list the names of the people being foreclosed on which is helpful in terms of organizing)
I went on the site that you just sent me and put in my zip code and it came up with close to 1000 foreclosures.
See shaded counties map of Illinois here: http://www.realtytrac.com/MapSearch/FreeSearch.aspx?searchType=stat...

OK, this is the actual foreclosure listing: http://cook.il-foreclosure.com/ you can see in the column on the far left what the date of sale will be--I think this comes out every week day and can be combined with the attachment I sent from Friday. This afternoon I will put all the single family homes on the map from Chicago.

[Jeff Wegerson]

From TPM:
"Where's the Bottom?

A lot to chew on in the new housing numbers out this morning from the National Association of Realtors. The drop in the average price of homes, 11.3 percent since last October, was the largest since the group began keeping records in 1968. Sales of previously owned homes fell 3.1 percent.

But perhaps the most interesting figure is that nearly half of all sales of existing homes in October were foreclosure sales. "