Thanks UCG and JP.. JP I agree about the search. As I said it is far from perfect because there is not an “enforced” standardized way for realtors to enter information with respect to short sales and reo properties.
What would be best would be if the gui that realtors use to enter data about a sold listing had a two simple pulldowns. One would be was this an REO and the second would be was this a short sale. Then searching in these fields would replace hodge podge string searches in the remarks or confidential remarks fields.
Someday maybe they will do that but not holding my breathe.
For trend identification though a string search with some manual parsing will do. Estimate a tolerance of a few percent in terms of missed listings.
