Dakota County Assessor - wow!

For those of you who check property records all the time, this is not news. Dakota County has recently dramatically upgraded their online access to property records with some amazing features! Property data, tax value, mapping, neighborhood sales, sheriff sales, downpayment assistance, homeowner education, it's all there! Check it out here

The northern edge of Northfield is just inside the southern boundary of Dakota County. It's actually a really big county that includes Lakeville, Farmington, Castle Rock, and parts of St Paul and Hastings, Burnsville, Apple Valley, and the western edge of Chicago. That's a big area to cover and a lot of property records to maintain. 

One of the new (impressive!) features is the foreclosure sheriff sale map by month. Just click the month and little data points pop up on the map, showing you who is being foreclosed and letting you guess about how much longer until they get evicted. This is both terrible and amazing. Something as personal as a family's financial difficulties is now that much easier for the world to snoop. It used to be just the savvy investor who knew how to get at this information in the county court house, but now just a few mouse clicks, a good google keyword search, and you can see when the Jones' house was sold at sheriff sale auction.