Hi Adam — I always appreciate if someone wants to dig into the data better, but I’m not quite sure I understand the issue here because the disparity you cite seems pretty explainable.
One answer is that a disproportionate number of foreclosures are in the low end areas, and a disproportionate number of sales in the high end areas — so it makes sense that the number of total REOs sitting there per total sales would be lower than the number of SOLD REOs vs sales (ie, more REO inventory is stacking up).
Another answer if I’m understanding is that you are tracking closed REO sales, while I am tracking recorded NODs and NOTs. The lag time between an NOT and REO closing is probably 2 months bare minimum (3 wks to get from NOT to REO, another month or more to close the sale), and probably a lot longer with that. With NOD it’s far longer than that by many months.
RE. the data sources: I’m not sure what foreclosure.com is. I get the data from the San Diego Daily Transcript, who gets it from the country recorder’s office. I used foreclosureforum.com for the historical data (since they had it in tabular format) but extensively spot checked and found a 100% accuracy rate between foreclosureforum.com and the Transcript. So since both sites are independently getting this from the country, I’m pretty sure they are reporting what they get from the county correctly. I don’t have any explanation for why the county numbers would be different from your title database.
