Want to learn more about your Milwaukee landlord? Check out this website

Want to learn more about your landlord?

A new website, MKEPropertyOwnership.com, can help you discover who's really behind your apartment — and how many properties they're connected to across the city of Milwaukee.

It's a tool created by John Johnson, a research fellow with Marquette University, and software developer Mitchell Henke, who wanted to make city property records more transparent.

On their website, you can find the code violations, eviction rate, and other properties associated with your landlord.

Why don't property records tell me more about my landlord?

If you're a renter in the city of Milwaukee, you can find basic information about your apartment — including who owns it, what year it was built, and who sold it last — by searching your address on the City Assessor's website.

You might, however, find that your apartment's legal owner is an LLC — not a person, or even a recognizable company.

The corporate entity registered to your apartment might just look like a string of letters and numbers. That won't tell you much about who's actually cashing your rent checks and investing in your home.

By piecing together many different public records, Johnson and Henke's landlord tracker traces the connections between these various LLCs.

Who are the biggest landlords in Milwaukee?

Milwaukee's biggest landlord, Joe Berrada, owns more than 9,000 rental units in the city of Milwaukee, according to Johnson and Henke's analysis.

City and state officials are very familiar with Berrada. He's currently being sued by the Wisconsin Department of Justice for alleged mistreatment of tenants.

Still, it's not easy to track all of his holdings across the city. Berrada owns his properties through more than 100 different companies, Johnson and Henke found.

Their website includes a ranking of the biggest owner networks in the city. Among the biggest Milwaukee landlords are:

• VineBrook Homes Trust, the biggest single-family rental operator in the city, which owns just under 800 properties across Milwaukee, according to the tracker. (The Journal Sentinel has written about VineBrook's rapid growth in Milwaukee, and its recent financial troubles.)

• The Mandel Group, which owns more than 2,000 rental units in Milwaukee, according to the tracker

How does the landlord tracker work?

The website pieces together a wide array of public records, to reveal "ownership networks" in Milwaukee.

Those records include city parcel information and state corporate registration information.

You can read more about the methodology here.

It's important to note that the tracker is an informational tool, and not a definitive account of property ownership in Milwaukee.

"We refer to each group of connected owners as a landlord network. The companies in a network are not legally the same, and we cannot say if they share ultimate ownership," Henke and Johnson note on their website.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee landlord ownership network traced by Marquette researcher