ChitownLiving | Chicago Real Estate + Life

Yes, there are foreclosures in Lincoln Park. Subscribe via RSS feed where you will receive the latest foreclosure listings, powered by our new Chicago home search. Continue reading to understand the method behind the magic …

The first option we added is something I’m especially proud of. You can now search for pre-foreclosures and bank owned listings in EVERY SINGLE MARKET WE SERVICE! We can do this by looking at two sets of data, both of which are provided by the MLS. First, we look at all of the features that are provided by the MLS for each property. If there’s a feature that denotes that the property is a short sale, is in pre-foreclosure, has had a notice of default filed against the owner, etc, then we mark it as a pre-foreclosure. If there’s a feature that says that the property has been foreclosed upon, is a lender / bank owned listing, is an REO, etc, then we mark it as bank owned.

If the MLS doesn’t provide features that say whether or not a property is distress, or if the agent just forgot to say that it’s in distress, we do something super special. We spent a very long time developing a proprietary algorithm to analyze the descriptions of each property, and for each of the literally millions of active listings in our database, we’ve run the descriptions through our algorithm to find out if it’s a pre-foreclosure or bank owned listing. We’ve run extensive tests, and our positive rate for matching these descriptions is near 99.5%! We toss out properties where the listing agent says things like “this house is not a preforeclosure” or “this house is better than a bank-owned listing.” The result is something we’re really proud of, and it’s something that we can confidently say that no one else has.

We know that there are still going to be small issues with this though, so we set up an email address that you can send property descriptions to so that our system will get better. That’s right – it’s ALIIIIVE! We will be continually training and refining our algorithm, so the more listings you send in that it either should have matched but didn’t or shouldn’t have matched but did, the better our system will get! We will manually review and classify each submission that comes through to ensure that our pre-foreclosure / foreclosure description analyzer is the very best there is!

Design your own custom Chicago foreclosure search.