State limits real estate data
December 24th, 2007 - Category: Real EstateAnyone can find out who has bought and sold property in the area by checking with the local county courthouse.
But the state of Wisconsin no longer releases that information — not even to subscribers who pay $5,000 a year for a copy of the state Department of Revenue’s real estate transfer database.
After The Post-Crescent and other Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers posted information from the database on its Web site in September, the agency ordered the newspapers to “cease and desist” the postings, and coincidentally began withholding names and other previously disclosed information from all of its paid subscribers.
The decision has real estate professionals and open records advocates questioning why the department suddenly changed its position on how it interprets the statute that governs the sale of the database.
“We perceive this to be public information,” said Joe Murray, director of political and government affairs for the Wisconsin Realtors Association.
He said the revenue department has reinterpreted the current statute on its own accord.
“There hasn’t been any change in statutes; there hasn’t been any rule changes,” said Murray. “To our knowledge, nothing has changed except the way the department now interprets the statute.”
Murray said the Realtors association, which represents 19,000 members statewide, plans to meet in committee next month to decide what action to take.
“We are aggressive in our lobbying efforts, and we’re aggressive in our legal efforts. If we decide that we need to use either or both because we don’t like what they’re doing, we’ll do either or both,” Murray said.
Revenue department sources say the state began selling the database in 2001 based on Wisconsin Statute 77.265(9), which states the department “may sell information obtained from the returns about street addresses, sale prices, the dates of sales and the types of conveyancing instruments.”
Dan Davis, director of the Bureau of Property Tax, said the revenue department hired a security officer to review all confidentiality provisions after an incident a year ago when the department mailed out tax booklets with Social Security numbers appearing on about 170,000 address labels because of a computer programming error.
Davis said that after reviewing the statutes, the security officer and legal staff advised that grantee and grantor names and addresses should be removed from the database, along with terms of the financing code.
“We removed that from the last quarter of the database for everybody that was purchasing that — which has not been popular with most of the purchasers,” said Davis.
He said the database is perceived as “less valuable” to some of the estimated 20 to 25 subscribers, who bring in up to $125,000 in revenue to the state treasury each year.
Peter Fox, executive director of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, agrees with the Realtors association that the database is an open record.
“It sounds like it’s a very restrictive interpretation on the part of the Department of Revenue to now begin withholding fairly routine information that once was widely available,” said Fox.
“In Wisconsin, the open records law clearly states that unless there is a good reason not to release a given bit of information, then it should be made available to the public.”
State Sen. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, said he can not discern why the department would consider it a liability to release the information.
“For somebody who likes transparency and sunshine in open records, it troubles me that they would do that,” said Cowles.
“I will be looking into it, and trying to find out why they’re making the decision, and how it’s hurting the ability of people to get the information that they need.”
Peter Shuttleworth, executive vice president of Multiple Listing Service Inc. and president of the Wiredata Corp., is a paid subscriber in Wauwatosa. He said it doesn’t make sense that he can walk into a county courthouse and get the same information that the state is now withholding from him.
“The Department of Revenue is just determining that because it’s on the real estate transfer return, which is their document, they don’t have the obligation to provide some of this information,” said Shuttleworth. “We’ll see how this all plays out.”
