If your dashboard contains a filter for subdivision, you may notice that not all the subdivision names are included. This usually stems from the fact that there can be THOUSANDS of subdivision names in the MLS. Often times, the field that captures the subdivision is a free text field rather than a picklist. This means that one person can enter 'Rolling Meadows' and another person can enter 'Rolling Medows', and the system has no way of knowing that one of them is misspelled. Or maybe someone enters it without a space between the words. You can see where this is going. Basically, the variability of the data in that field makes it not a great source of data. But we have to use it.
In addition to not wanting to force users to dig through and select multiple different versions of the same name to get relevant statistics, there is another consideration. To quote Top Gun, we have a need, a need for speed. Imagine you're trying to run stats for an area, and the chart takes 15 or 20 seconds to load. You'd probably stop using the dashboard right then and there. The negative impact to the user experience isn't worth exposing a massive list of somewhat messy data so that every single subdivision can be represented. So we limit the number of values in the list to increase the overall speed. Generally speaking, we look across the entire data set and count how many listings are in each unique subdivision. Then we'll pick a cutoff point where we group all the smaller subdivisions into something creative like "Other Subdivision." This is recalculated nightly, so as more listings are added, subdivisions on the cusp will make their way into the enumerated list.
Obviously one downside to this is that new subdivisions will take a while to make their way into the stats. In some cases, the MLS will request that certain subdivisions are added even though they don't reach the required number of listings. Yes, we can do that. So if you have special needs, contact your MLS and make your case. If they agree with you, they'll send us the request for implementation.
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