Sacramento Real Estate Blog

I was getting ready to publish some average and median price change data, and in the course of it I found I needed to massage several of the community names for a table. Since I was in the middle of a copy/paste anyway, I thought I’d share with you this table that shows how the MLS views Sacramento County. This is massaged only slightly for readability, with “Sacto” in some cases replaced with “Sacramento”, and the MLS area codes have been converted into zip codes (don’t ask).

Naturally one of the ways we as Realtor®s can search for properties for you is by any combination of these areas. However, one of the fun things about being a Realtor® is how many different ways we can set up search (well, maybe that’s just fun if you’re a nerd, but there, the shoe fits perfectly).

For example, we can search by a radius from a given address or MLS number, a technique I often use when running comparable sales or for buyers who don’t want to be too far out from Such-and-Such. Moreover, if you’ve searched on this web site much and clicked through on property details, you’ve probably noticed that for simplicity’s sake, our search engine here only allows you to search for some of the fields that are in the MLS. (By the way, I didn’t intentionally limit it, that’s just the way my service provider set it up, but I do agree in general with their design choices). Our Realtor® MLS search, in contrast, pretty much allows us to search on any field in the MLS, so if you just have to have a three car garage and only a gas stove will do, we can do that. However, with that, a word of caution for you if you’re asking me or another Realtor® to do this:

• If the field isn’t in the MLS, or if it’s only included in marketing comments or another full text field, you may not get everything you want.
• Not all Realtors® have the right combination of nerdity and experience to know where all the information is. I’m a pretty major nerd, and I’m still learning after four years where they hide some of it.
• As always with computer databases, the search results you get are only as good as the data. Especially in the case of fields that are optional or that allow multiple values, we’re at the mercy of the listing agents, who may or may not have entered the correctly or at all. Of course, we can also follow up with calls and visits etc., but naturally that takes longer to do.

Anyway, without further preamble, here’s the list of MLS Areas in Sacramento: