The single family home and condo market here in Atlanta has slowed.

There… I said it!  However the doom and gloom that all of the national media and local newspapers are constantly reporting on are starting to get to me with their blatant misrepresentation of the truth. 

 They certainly aren’t flat out lying, they are just bending the truth as they love to do.

They certainly aren’t putting these stories on the cover of their papers:

• Atlanta leads fight to lure young and restless
• Atlanta Ranks 10th in the country post Bubble
• In fact the only thing that may be cooling is the housing bubble, check out Brad Nix’s coverage of Mark Cubans Bubble tracking tool
• Atlanta to add 2 Million residents by 2030
• Slow and Steady wins the race

So anyway… Here is a great example in Today’s cover story of the AJC:

Georgia foreclosures jump 99%; rate is nation’s 3rd highest
Homeowners feel pain as climbing adjustable mortgage rates bite back

In the article they paint a gloomy picture stating certain facts and omitting others.  Lets face it, the average reader or even real estate professional typically doesn’t fully understand the foreclosure process.  I would like to say that the AJC doesn’t understand it either…but my guess is they do. 

My point:

The article states in the headline and the body of text that “Foreclosures in Georgia are up a stunning 99 percent in the past year.  The state now has the nation’s third-highest rate of foreclosures: One in every 449 households. In October, that meant 6,895 properties were in the foreclosure process.”  See the missing number?  This is like where is waldo…

Since I worked in the foreclosure business for some time buying at auction, selling, negotiating workout arrangements with lenders, taking properties Subject-to and the thing we were always trying to figure out was this missing piece of info.  Still can’t guess?  Well its simple… it is the actual number of homes actually sold at auction “foreclosed” if you will.  See this article clearly states that the homes entering foreclosure was up  but it never states that X number of houses were foreclosed in 2005 and this is how many so far this year.  I suspect because like the research nuts that we are… they couldn’t find this out either.  I looked back at many of their Doom and Gloom stories dating way back and cant seem to find the exact year by year statistics. 

 I would love to hear their response to this clear and obvious omission just to sell some newspapers. 

The AJC Response:

Mr. Stevens, Thanks so much for the message.

Have you sent me other emails (’I'm still waiting’)? This is the first message from you that I am aware of. If you have sent other messages that were snagged by our spam filter — or that I lost in a barrage of other communiqués — please accept my apologies. I do try to respond to readers. About the actual number of homes lost, you raise a good point. That ‘missing number’ would be nice to have in the article. Here’s why it is not there: Because there is no central database that tracks that number. The deeds that indicate a transfer of ownership are filed in court, but there is, as best as I can tell, no one who puts them all together. I do hope we can do some more research and come up with something more definitive. I wish we had done so already, but it will take a fair amount of time — and keep in mind that when we do get to research this, we are not likely to get a precise number. That said, I don’t think we have tried to tell people that all properties in the foreclosure process end up with the homeowner chucked out. We said, ‘hundreds’ of homeowners would lose their homes. Think about the six thousand-plus homes that were listed last month. Attorneys who are involved in this have given me a range of estimates, from about twenty percent to nearly half. Let’s say it is at the low end of that

— let’s say it is even fewer. Let’s say that a mere fifteen percent of homes that are advertised as being in the foreclosure process go all the way through: That would be roughly nine hundred homeowners (out of the six thousand) losing their title. I do hope that at some point we can get closer to the precise number. But in the meantime, what we used — ‘hundreds’ — seems like a conservative estimate. As to whether the question of whether we should ignore or downplay this story, I think a ninety-nine percent increase in foreclosure filings seems significant. As to the larger question of whether we are making too much of trouble in real estate, I think the stories we have done are fair — especially in a context of rising inventories, falling sales numbers and stagnating prices. Meanwhile a large reservoir of homeowners with modest incomes are holders of mortgage products — adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), option ARMs and interest-only mortgages — that set them up for problems. Which means that this trend *might* get much worse. You may disagree. Thanks again for writing.