Government Should Gather Foreclosure Home Data

While home foreclosure is largely recognized as the major cause of the recession, the collection and tracking of foreclosure home data has been left to the private sector. No government agency or state government has launched an effort to collect and monitor foreclosure data.

Media organizations and government agencies have largely depended on private real estate research companies that regularly publish their foreclosure home data.

Housing analysts are now perplexed that the federal government did not include the collection, analysis and monitoring of foreclosure home data among its foreclosure prevention programs.

Georgia Tech professor Dan Immergluck, who has focused on the study of foreclosures, said any foreclosure prevention or mitigation program will be more successful if program developers are working with true and adequate data.

Most foreclosure data released to the media have been purely counts of foreclosures and percentages. They do not include more informative data such as causes of foreclosures, types of mortgage loans, backgrounds of homeowners losing their homes and names of lenders.

The lack of more instructive foreclosure home data has been crippling more targeted lawmaking. National and state lawmakers have been crafting laws on foreclosure prevention and mortgage loans without using more detailed information.

In April, there were 7,462 foreclosure houses listed in legal advertisements in metro Atlanta. But the report most often quoted in media listed only 3,746 foreclosure notices in metro Atlanta for the month of April. What could have caused the significant difference?

Real estate research firms that release foreclosure data on a nationwide basis have been questioned time and again about the veracity of their figures and their methods of data collection.

But still their foreclosure data is used as basis for everything from policymaking to news writing and foreclosure home selling.

Property research firms argue that their foreclosure figures differ from figures gathered by other entities because they exclude housing units that have been listed within six months prior to current data gathering to prevent double-counting.

Economists also said that most foreclosure research firms do not count foreclosures in all counties of a state.

For many economists, the mortgage delinquency report released quarterly by the Mortgage Bankers Association is a more reliable report, but the MBA report gathers data only on the state level.

All in all, many economists believe that the federal government should collect and track its own foreclosure home statistics so it can create the right response to the problem.