Dr Housing Bubble 08/12/09

Creating a Central Foreclosure and Mortgage Database: The Urgent Need to Centralize Housing Data.

There is an urgent need to centralize important pieces of housing data. I view this on the level of employment data or even calculating GDP. Housing has become such a crucial component of our nation’s economy that I am stunned, nearly two years into this crisis that we have not spent any money in a concerted effort to bring housing data under one umbrella. We spend trillions in bailouts yet will not allocate what, a few million to create a central hub of this information? When we investigated Southern California we used three different sources to come up with our estimate that 40,000 homes are lurking as shadow inventory. Some argue that this issue is minor and will have a minor impact on the overall market. Others argue that shadow inventory is much larger than many would expect and this will have an effect on the overall market.

In searching for Alt-A and option ARM data for example, we have to rely on multiple sources of data including the Federal Reserve and independent studies. We have a raw number of loans and average balances yet this data is not connected in any easy format to foreclosures:



I view this as an urgent need. If we are to conduct any thorough analysis it would be useful to have the multiple data providers under one central hub. Take for example California and two large data providers in RealtyTrac and DataQuick. Let us look at distress property data for Q2 of 2009:

http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/creating-a-central-foreclosure-and-mortgage-database-the-urgent-need-to-centralize-housing-data/