This is a small sample confined to a particular area but may shore up foreclosure.com’s data. I am a cheap and arrogant bastard. This combination wont allow me to pay the subscription fee for foreclosure.com (which would cut into my porn website subscription budget) and the arrogance makes me think I can outsmart them. They give you a zestimate on the foreclosure page and a name on the preforeclosure page (they keep them there for a bit as inactive once they are foreclosures), I track both, use the gis and property tax website for the county to figure out the address using the name (tedious because you have to run all the apn’s on the street, for big streets I jog by and look for brown lawns). Then I run a grantee search online to verify the nod and not, then run the name in the newspaper legal classifieds to see the actual notice for the N.O.T. and get the debt amount. I have run about a hundred and all of them have fleshed out to be accurate. Furthermore I have found at least a dozen that never went into the MLS but some got for sale signs from out of county real estate offices and I have verified that they have sold to private paties that way, never going into the mls and selling for very low prices, almost making me angry that they didn’t go into the MLS. Conversely I have never found them on the MLS without first seeing them on foreclosure.com.

This is confined to a single zip code but may explain the data anamoly, my conclusion is the mls data is faulty, not foreclosure’s.

I can only offer my small sample tracked for about a year, I would do the sample in another area to verify my results but that would qualify as an obsessive compulsive disorder, for now I can justify my insanity and I hear that the meds have terrible side effects.