Tracking foreclosure stats
As my grandfather said, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.* And there’s more than one way to track properties in foreclosure.
One of my favorite bloggers, the Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik, has an interesting discussion of several data services used to track foreclosures across the country.
Now before I get a bunch of hate mail from the local Realtors and other real estate types, let me say that the residential property market in most of the state is in pretty good shape. In Oklahoma, we haven’t seen the kind of runaway, double-digit increases in home values that some parts of the country have seen in the last five years.
As my colleague, Real Estate Editor Richard Mize, likes to say, “There is no national housing market.” We’re a patchwork of local markets, with some doing better or worse than others. Tracking foreclosures in most markets is no easy feat, especially when much of the data comes from courthouse data that isn’t readily available online in many markets.
As Bialik points out in his column, the main media sources for foreclosure stats are the Mortgage Bankers Association, RealtyTrac and First American CoreLogic. All three have varying methodologies to their data gathering, which gives a slightly different picture to the foreclosure rates in particular communities.
Compounding the difficulty is that foreclosure is at its heart a legal process. So your home can be placed into foreclosure, but you might work something out with your lender before it actually runs the full course of the foreclosure process. Some of the private companies tracking foreclosure activity actually report it at several different points in the process, making the numbers a little murkier.
One thing is clear, though. If your property has made it to this list, it’s probably too late.
–Paul
*Sorry, PETA fans.
Written by Paul Monies
Follow @pmonies
Thank you for joining our conversation on Data Watch. We encourage your discussion but ask that you stay within the bounds of our commenting and posting policy.
Comments
Great article as always, Sean. But the truth is, the government has been intricately involved in the real estate industry for many decades. Social policy implemented by the government has included the mortgage interest deduction and many other rules and tax breaks. I can’t imagine that ending in the near future, nor would I be in favor of it.
After rising foreclosures and the expiration of buyer tax credits that boosted demand early in the year, Zillow Inc. said US home values will probably drop this year. Home prices may drop as much as 11 percent more through the first quarter of 2012 before finding a bottom, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report.
Fair enough, though I’m not sure I agree that government involvement has really turned out that well. Countries like Australia have similar homeownership rates without mortgage interest deductions, and I believe much of the volatility in our housing market is a result of these government programs
Hey all, I used to be just checkin out this site and that i really admire the inspiration of the article!
Is there any way to determine how a certain foreclosure tracking system monitors foreclosures? I think it’s interesting that not everyone follows the same protocol.