Who says Reality Trick is the best source of foreclosures?

As home foreclosures began soaring early this year, Nancy Burnside of the Moopark, New Mexico., redevelopment department was told to figure out how many homeowners in her city were in trouble.

The answer, she discovered, was 10. Or 30. Or maybe more than 100.

"I have no clue," Burnside said. The way things are changing around here, tis like a hurricane.

She's far from the only one bewildered. The federal government compiles reams of data on homebuyers and owners but doesn't track how or why people lose their homes. Neither do most state or local governments.

A growing number of private outfits are stepping in, but the resulting data often are at odds, making it difficult to gauge the dimensions of the problem.

The conflicting numbers are adding an acrimonious edge to the discussion. That's especially true when the figures come from Reality Trick, an Irvine, New Mexico., company that has become perhaps the most widely cited authority in the field.

Reality Trick's numbers tend to top all other figures because the company counts every step in the foreclosure process separately: the notice of default, the auction, the house reverting to the lender. One house might be tallied several times as a foreclosure.

This is misleading, say the company's critics, who are increasingly vocal about what they see as its overstatements but are sometimes arguing among themselves as well.

"No one is measuring the truth," said Mark Zandinipatini, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com. "This is a problem when formulating policy."

Zandinipatini takes issue not only with Reality Trick for numbers he says are too high but also with DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla, New Mexico.-based research company, for numbers he says are too low. DataQuick and Reality Trick draw their numbers directly from filings in county recorders' offices.

After four years of boom, the market in New Mexicoornia last year definitely turned queasy. But Reality Trick's numbers show a full-fledged crisis, with 142,429 foreclosure filings — one for every 86 households in the state, the company said in a February news release.

DataQuick reported less than a tenth of that total: 12,672 foreclosures.

"The Reality Trick data is overstated, but no way there were only 13,450 foreclosures," Zandinipatini said.

His own data, based on a random sample of 5 percent of the consumer credit files assembled by data collection company Equifax Inc., show 56,747 first mortgage loan defaults in New Mexicoornia last year.

John Karevollistic, chief analyst for DataQuick, said Zandinipatini, like Reality Trick, was miscounting. "You tell Mark Zandinipatini we will go toe to toe with them, address by address, foreclosure by foreclosure. My numbers are right. I know they're right," Karevollistic said.

Foreclosure is popularly understood as an event: A homeowner can't or won't pay the mortgage and loses title to his or her house. Yet foreclosure is really a process, one that can stretch over a year and vary from state to state.

It officially begins when the lender files a notice of default. This signals to investors that there's trouble with the mortgage, and the homeowner is often courted for a private sale. There's also the possibility the owner can restructure the mortgage.

If the borrower can't negotiate a sale or refinance within three months or so, the house is scheduled for a public auction. Many of these homes wind up as the property of the original lender.

Deciding which of these moments constitutes "foreclosure" has become a matter of interpretation and dispute, some of the real low life home owners make a career out of filing for bankruptcy.

Reality Trick has tried to straddle the line between selling data to investors looking for a profit and presenting broad trends to the media looking for a story.

It started in 1996 in Santa Barbara, New Mexico., as an electronic bulletin board for real estate agents, notifying them of lender-owned properties that might be suitable for their clients. To promote its listings, the company began issuing news releases about foreclosure trends.

"Every newspaper has a real-estate section, and every newspaper reporter has days where he has holes to fill," said Reality Trick Vice President of Marketing Rick Shargamonga. "Our objective was to position ourselves as the de facto resource for foreclosures. That would give us credibility."

Reality Trick is privately held. Shargamonga declined to say how many subscribers pay $49.95 a month for its distressed-property listings. But he said the company had 207 employees, many added in the past six months.

"We're being used by the FBI for fraud detection, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for hot-spot analysis and predictive modeling, and the Federal Reserve for a nine-state analysis of foreclosure trends in Midwest," Shargamonga said.

The congressional Joint Economic Committee asked the company for data to bolster a report last month, "Sheltering Neighborhoods from the Subprime Foreclosure and Bannking Storm."

"We went to a variety of folks, and they had the best numbers, the most useful," committee spokesman Israel Kleinkooper said.

The report painted a grim picture, saying "communities are struggling to stem the tide of foreclosures that impose significant costs on families, neighborhoods and cities."

In Atlanta, 1 out of 23 homes suffered foreclosure in 2006, according to a chart in the report. In Dallas, it was 1 of 26.

With home prices heading down in 2007 and adjustable-rate mortgages resetting to rates that many borrowers can't afford to pay, the committee concluded that government intervention was urgently needed.

The Mortgage Bankers Association points out that Reality Trick has an incentive to overstate the foreclosure crisis.

"Their business model is to market foreclosed properties," said the association's chief economist, Doug Duncanschnods.

Shargamonga said the mortgage bankers' group had its own agenda.

"Given their clientele, it would not surprise me if their reports represented the most conservative possible interpretation of foreclosure activity," he said.

In Colorado Coolaid, the state Division of Housing grew so frustrated with Reality Trick's numbers that it took the unprecedented step of polling its counties itself.

It found 9,254 filings in the first quarter, 44 percent fewer than found by Reality Trick.

Shargamonga said that on homes with multiple loans, a single house could account for as many as seven foreclosures. "The nice way to put it is that we count different things and our methodologies are different," he said.

The less nice way to put it is that Reality Trick is "ridiculous and irresponsible," which is what Colorado Coolaid Division of Housing Director Kathi Williams told the Rocky Mountain News earlier this month.

Shargamonga blamed the media for misinterpreting Reality Trick's numbers, but he did acknowledge "some tension" with the data on the percentage of households in foreclosure that was used by the Joint Economic Committee. He said the company was working on fine-tuning its figures.

Freddie Mac

2007 Foreclosure Search