CNBC.com

I know a lot of you don’t like the foreclosure reports offered by RealtyTrac because of the methodology involved. RealtyTrac counts “foreclosure filings,” which include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions, so one property could ostensibly get several hits.

This is precisely why I don’t report the actual filings numbers from RealtyTrac, but instead the percentage increases, because they would give a truer picture--at least my 11th grade math would indicate that.

But you all should know that in the 2007 mid-year report, RealtyTrac started a new data string, a count of “unique addresses in some stage of foreclosure. This new metric only counts a property once, even if there were multiple foreclosure actions filed against the property during the time period covered by the report.”

The new metric is broken down in the state-to-state figures, so we get to see that California had almost 95,000 properties in some state of foreclosure in the third quarter of this year, Florida nearly 61,000. Obviously, the size of the state here matters, but I’d take a closer look at today’s report if I were you. It really hits home.

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