Faulty Data Count Upsets Housing Officials

With regards to real estate data released recently, officials say that there are chances of undercounting or over counting in mortgages and foreclosures in US mortgage data. For instance, officials believe that in Colorado the numbers have been over counted.

Monthly and quarterly Reports of RealtyTrac on the number of mortgage foreclosures helps in analyzing the issues in the mortgage market. Officials say that RealtyTrac data is disguising the actual condition of housing foreclosures in various states.

Defending themselves, company officials said that they gather data on foreclosure sales, mortgage default notices and lender repossessions. Such information is collected from major counties representing 96 percent of the population of the U.S, and 74 percent of the family units. In case the data collected represents more than 95 percent of the overall population they use it to project the numbers. Still, if something is under reported, officials say, it must be because of an intrinsic difficulty in collecting information from individual counties. In addition, the old and complicated make up of some of the counties makes it very difficult to hunt for data. RealtyTrac is ready to rework the data for any of the counties whose data is not correct. At the same time they also say that their data presents a significant portion of the foreclosure filing numbers.

Colorado, which topped the foreclosure chart presented by RealtyTrac, is actually not at the top. This was concluded when the Colorado administration itself collected data and found that it was much less than what was projected by RealtyTrac.

28,436 foreclosures last year were reported by the state’s data whereas RealtyTrac’s data reported almost double the figures at 54748 foreclosures. In the quarterly report of this year, Colorado’s official figure was 9253 whereas RealtyTrac’s was 16434, second in the list. The survey was done by Colorado’s housing division. The data was collected from the public trustee’s offices of the county which points out the number of families severely delinquent on loans.

Whereas the foreclosure numbers of Minnesota is remarkably undercounted. The current report on the county sheriff mortgage foreclosure sales indicates 11207 last year. This figure is almost double the figure, given by RealtyTrac, which was 5994 homes.

The housing fund president of Greater Minnesota, who conducted the study, found the need to present facts that were lacking in the report presented by RealtyTrac, and therefore he submitted the request to redo the survey once again. According to him, there are various small cities and town that RealtyTrac overlooked. The number of foreclosure filings in these areas is tremendous. What RealtyTrac represented were estimates, and not the complete facts, and so their county was placed 34^th, far behind where it actually should have been.

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