The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. Add to that more than 3,000 tipsheets from our national conferences on how to cover specific beats or do specific stories and you have a resource that no reporter or editor should be without. These stories and tipsheets are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Logged-in members can view the tipsheets free online:
Search results for "real estate" ...
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Real Estate Data with Tableau Public
In this demo we'll create a workbook describing the real estate trends of a city or neighborhood. While we use a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. (Shaw), the techniques and dashboard could be applied anywhere with real estate data.
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Unsung Documents
This tipsheet provides information on how to find and effectively use documents in your reporting. It also give tips on working with material once you've obtained it. They also include a "favorite list" of docu
Tags: tax liens; campaign contributions; court records; flight logs; flight manifests; air travel consumer reports; unemployment; workers' comp; real estate; 911 tapes; surveillance videos
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Borrowers Betrayed: Covering Business as a Crime Scene
This tipsheet details how a computer-assisted reporting investigation into toxic home loans turned into a crime story when in-depth analysis showed 10,000 people with criminal histories had been licensed as mortgage professionals.
Tags: mortgage; subprime; toxic loans; Florida; criminal justice; shoe-leather reporting; fraud; real estate; brokerage; stolen identity
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Following the Money
Cochran's powerpoint explores the use of data to cover the financial crisis. He provides an overview of banks, and a link to the BankTracker project, by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, that tracks the quarterly reports each bank submits to the FDIC. He also provides information on how to obtain data from the FDIC, and tips on tracking a bank with some details on the types of data available in this data.
Tags: financial crisis; banking; FDIC; Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; assets; loans; securities; real estate; loan losses; interest income; non-interest income
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What's next in housing? CAR for real estate
Grotto explores the potential for CAR stories in the midst of the current housing crisis. Suggests looking at the redevelopment of public and low income housing. He talks about the new strategy of mixed-income developments in Chicago. Grotto details where to go for housing data. Grotto lists key documents when doing housing stories: master ground lease; restrictive covenants; leasehold mortgages; quick claim deeds; regulatory and operating agreements.
Tags: public housing; low-income housting tax credit; LIHTC; HOME block grants; recorder of deeds;
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Mortgage Meltdown: Foreclosures and Beyond
The author discusses some problems with popular sources for mortgage information, and then suggests better resources to use instead. The suggested resources include the Warrern Group and the Department of Revenue.
Tags: mortgage; housing; real estate; foreclosure
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Mortgage Meltdown: Resources for Fast-Paced Investigations in your Region
The author offers advice for reporters looking into trends in foreclosure and subprime loans. She discusses sources like Dataquick, RealtyTrac, Policymap and loanperformance.com, which collect and analyze home sales records.
Tags: mortgage; internet resource; housing market; finance; business beat; real estate; census
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Using CAR for covering housing foreclosures
At the 2007 CAR Conference, Jill Reipenhoff and Geoff Dutton shared various sources of information useful for investigations about home foreclosures. Some of the sources include the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, county auditors, and the National Delinquency Survey. The authors also share some examples of their own analysis on the topic.
Tags: property law; eviction; landlords; mortgage; real estate; data analysis; HUD; assessment
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A Neighborhood Built to Fail
Mellnik discusses how to identify foreclosures, starter homes and lenders from various public records. He explains how to use the register of deeds, county property records, FHA data, building permits, bankruptcy filings, and consultant reports to find data for a story about property records. He also includes some tips about mapping foreclosures.
Tags: property; foreclosure; mapping; data analysis; public records; real estate; beat reporting
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Using property tax/appraisal records in stories: avoiding pitfalls
Lavigne shares general and specific advise for utilizing property and tax records in investigative stories. She explains how to deal with challenges and irregularities that occur when working with land records, and lists types of records that are frequently overlooked.
Tags: land records; real estate; property taxes; titles; deeds; contracts