How to research Dane County foreclosures

Foreclosure data is public record information that is available from the Wisconsin Circuit Court website. We use this data to update our monthly Dane County foreclosure statistics on the economic trends page at DaneCountyMarket.com.

Collecting the data is easy and takes only a few minutes of time. For example, here's how we identified the number of Dane County foreclosures for the month of June:

1. Go to the Wisconsin Circuit Court website at http://wcca.wicourts.gov/index.xsl.
2. Click "I Agree".
3. Click "Advanced Search" to proceed to the search criteria page.
4. Select "Dane" for the County field.
5. Select "Civil" for the Case Type field.
6. Enter a date of "6/1/2008" in the Filing Date field; then specify a reporting period of "30 Days".
7. In the Class Code field, enter a code of "30404", for Foreclosure of Mortgage.
8. Click "Search".

If you run through the above steps yourself, you'll see a total of 89 new foreclosures were filed in Dane County during the month of June. For each of these cases, you'll be able to drill down into the case details to view information about the plaintiff, defendant and the property (we've omitted defendant and property details from the screen shot below for obvious reasons).

In our next post, we'll begin with the first of several posts that provide an up-close look at the latest Dane County foreclosure trends. Later in the week, we'll provide information on different strategies you can use to locate foreclosure properties.