Legal Research

Foreclosure Alarm Offers Alerts of WI Pre-foreclosure Filings

Foreclosure Alarm is a new company based out of Madison which offers real-time notifications of all pre-foreclosure filings in Wisconsin. The data is derived from CCAP.

From the Attorney Benefits page:

• Search foreclosure filings based on county, zip code, partial zip code (for metro area matches), plaintiff names and event types.


• Subscribe to whatever counties in which you are interested. Receive instant email notifications whenever a pre-foreclosure filing is entered in the CCAP statewide system.


• After you've searched and found the list of filings you are interested in, simply click the export link at the top of the list. This will download a spreadsheet to your computer specifically formatted for easy mail merge with programs like Microsoft Word.


• With our Filing Watch, you can choose which event types you are interested in. Many events occur during the foreclosure process - many of which you probably aren't interested to know about. With our system, you can filter out these events and only keep track of the ones important to you.

Foreclosure Alarm is priced at $39.95/month for all features. A free trial is also available. They have created a short video explaining how it works.

I spoke with developer Philip Crawford yesterday about the differences between Foreclosure Alarm and CCAP itself. Although the data is derived from CCAP, Foreclosure Alarm's notification service is unique. While CCAP does offer RSS feeds now, they are only available for the basic search. There seems to be no way to get a CCAP feed based on a class code or case type search. Plus, Foreclosure Alarm also offers downloadable spread sheets for mail merging.

Philip also informed me that they are also considering the development of a more generalized notifications system which would incorporate all case types. I also recommended that they look into offering RSS feeds in addition to the email notifications.

Thanks to Carol Bannen for alerting me to this new service.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on March 25, 2008 (boomark / email).