Current Housing Indicators |
| CURRENT | PREVIOUS | ||
| Existing Home Sales | 4.49m | ▼ | 4.74m |
| New Home Sales | 309,000 | ▼ | 344,000 |
| Housing Starts | 583,000 | ▲ | 477,000 |
| Building Permits | 547,000 | ▲ | 531,000 |
| HMI | 9 | UNCH | 9 |
| Existing Home Prices | $170,300 | ▼ (annually) | $199,800 |
| New Home Prices | $201,100 | ▼ (annually) | $232,400 |
More Videos
- Shadow Inventory Dwarfs Loan Mods
- The Battered Businesses Behind Housing
- Watch Foreclosures, Seriously
- Home Buyer Tax Credit Expansion Heads to Obama
- Congratulations America, We're All Landlords Now
- Wells Fargo Bets on Housing Recovery
- Home Buyer Tax Credit Done: Does it Matter?
- Better Times for Mortgage Banking
- 'Beleaguered Big Builders' Sitting On Piles of Cash
- Home Buyer Tax Credit: Final Deal?
MOST SHARED
- Apple Surpasses Nokia as Top Cellphone Maker by Profits
- Herbalife Vs. Hedge Funds
- China Factory Output Leaps to 19-Month Highs
- America Is On Sale
- Three Things the US Can Do To Stop the Dollar's Decline
- Toll Brothers: More Contracts Signed, but Sales Down
- Cramer Jeers J&J, Applauds Abbott
- Gold Heading to $1150: Art Hogan
- SingTel Posts Higher Quarterly Profit, Cautious on Growth
- Beware of 'Trampling Effect' When Market Tops: Manager
- Gold Heading to $1150: Art Hogan
- Starbucks Brews Up Growth
- Farr: An Extended Period—No Fat Lady in Sight
- More Upside if S&P Passes This Number: Market Pro
- Murdoch Lashes Out At Google
- Fighting The Flu Vaccine Critics
- Nov. 10: Unusual Volume Leaders
- Shadow Inventory Dwarfs Loan Mods
- US Recovery to be Weak, Erratic: Top Fed Officials
- Retail Earnings in Focus Ahead of Shopping Season
- Apple Surpasses Nokia as Top Handset Maker by Profit
- Brazil's Largest Cities Hit by Blackout
- In This Relay-Race Market, Who Gets Baton Next?
- Workers Staying Put at Their Jobs as Jobless Surges
- Ponzi Proceeds: Bidding on Madoff's Toys
- Toll Brothers: More Contracts Signed, but Sales Down
- Bear Stearn Fund Managers Not Guilty on All Counts
RSS FEED
Realty Check
Text Size 
 |
But out in Newark, NJ, a reporter at the Newark Star Ledger newspaper was throwing a big wrench in the data. The paper reported yesterday that RealtyTrac is revising its formula, and that could, “dramatically decrease the number of foreclosures in any given state, according to RealtyTrac.”
So all the bosses at NBC Nightly News, who are about to put me on the big show to report these numbers that I got, start filling my Blackberry with worries. Are these numbers from Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac to be believed? Are they in fact hyping the numbers because part of their services include listing houses for sale, and buyers looking to get a deal on properties in distress--pay $49.95 a month to subscribe to RealtyTrac?
Here’s the deal. RealtyTrac gets its total number of foreclosures--176,137 in May--by adding up “default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions,” according to their press release. Does that mean that some properties get counted multiple times? You bet it does.
Were there 176,137 foreclosures in May? Nope. A house can go through several permutations: first the default, then the bank repossession, then the auction, and in some states this can go on for many months with many different filings; therefore, many of these homes are counted multiple times. So do I trust that 176 thousand number? Nope. But I do trust the percentage increases.
If RealtyTrac has been counting the homes in the same way for many years, then the monthly and yearly increases are in fact apples to apples, and are in fact relevant. Are they perfect? Of course not, but they are credible in showing real movement in foreclosure activity. Make sense?
As for the change that RealtyTrac is implementing, well I furiously emailed Rick Sharga, the Veep of marketing at the company, worried that they were suddenly going to announce their previous data were bunk. He wrote back, “Just to put your mind further at ease, we’re NOT changing the way we get the data, or count the filings. We’re just digging deeper into the data we already get in order to provide one more metric (# of individual homes affected)." In other words, they are reacting to the criticism and offering a new number that will show only the specific number of homes involved, and that will clearly be less than 176,137.
Does this clarify the issue at all? Hope so. I still stand by our reporting the RealtyTrac numbers because an increase of 90% even in “foreclosure activity” is news. Tomorrow we get the quarterly delinquency data from the Mortgage Bankers Association, which by the way widely criticizes RealtyTrac, so look for it around 10 am.
We’ve been saying that the subprime ripples were only just beginning, and this proves the premise.
Questions? Comments?
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes