foreclosure

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Interesting piece of reporting by David Streitfeld in today’s LATimes on the problem with foreclosure data. The problem is, the government doesn’t track defaults and foreclosures in any meaningful way, and the private companies that do (RealtyTrac, Dataquick, etc.), have different ways of adding up the numbers.

Snippet: ‘The federal government compiles reams of data on home buyers and owners, but it doesn’t track how or why people lose their homes. Neither do most state or local governments.’

More: ‘RealtyTrac’s numbers tend to top all other figures because the company counts every step in the foreclosure process — the notice of default, the auction, the house reverting to the lender — separately. One house might be tallied several times as a foreclosure.’

This is not really a problem for the people who buy RealtyTrac’s information -- they are real estate professionals looking to buy foreclosed properties, or get listings from banks looking to unload foreclosed houses. But it is a problem for politicians trying to figure out how bad the foreclosure problem is, and what, if anything, the government should do in response.

To be clear, the government has all the data it needs; it just makes no effort to manage, sort, or analyze the data. As Streitfeld reports, the LA County recorder’s office in Norwalk receives 3 million documents a year. ‘They’re filed in no particular order,’ he reports.

This strikes me as a problem that some really smart kids from Santa Monica College could fix with some Dell laptops and a server, but what do I know?

Comments? Thoughts? Insights of staggering brilliance?
Photo Credit: LA Times