The most accurate way is to simply search the tax roll to see the owner. However this is quite tedious and time consuming although Perry Chase did say he was going to be formulating this project in a previous thread!
Anyways the MLS doesn’t have a clear cut way to do this. One can do a text search on various fields in the remarks or confidential remarks but that will not be totally accurate. It is very useful to track the trends as sdrealtor has done.
The best thing to do would be to create a script that would parse through the database of tax rolls for all active listings. Definitely a great project for a software engineer.
The bottom line is that the countywide numbers that sdr logs in the short sale monitor thread indicate that the percentage of short sales is growing countywide. Not only that, the percentage as a whole of the active inventory is growing as well. I would surmise that in areas like El Cajon the percentages of shorts exceed the countywide ratios fairly substantially.
My opinion is that this trend will continue. Don’t be surprised if those under 200k drop to the 150k and lower within a year or less.
