The Second quarter foreclosure reports continue to roll in with the latest figures from Realty Trac released. One general statistic released by Realty Trac, a foreclosure reporting company based out of Irvine, California, has been appearing on hundreds of newspaper articles across the country.

According to all articles and taken directly from the Realty Trac foreclosure activity report, “one in every 171 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing during the quarter.”

Performing calculations and some further investigation, one could take the same information and present it in a way more favorable to the reporter’s interest. This, in essence is reporter bias -a prominent factor in unregulated statistics.

In order to get to the foundation of the statistical representation, a reporter must first get the hard numbers.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau the latest households figure was in 2000 at 105,480,101. 1 out of every 171 households would then equal 616,842 national foreclosure filings for the second quarter of 2008.

One factor that could be misconstruing the data is the fact that households have largely increased since 2000. Based on the latest population census of 2006, the population increased at a rate of 1.06% per year. Applied to the number of households, one would then get a new number of 114,445,909 households in 2008 an increase of 14 million households. While the rate of foreclosure filings per household does not change dramatically, the rate of actual foreclosures per household does.

If you read through the majority of the Realty Trac foreclosure activity report you will find valuable information in the fine print. This information should be very prominent in the article, but it is not. According to the report, “bank repossessions, or REOs, accounted for 30 percent of total foreclosure activity in the second quarter.”

Using the 30% figure, you can then calculate 185,052 actual foreclosures for the second quarter of 2008. This number combined with the updated U.S. Census household information provides the following statistical summation of “foreclosure activity.”

1 in 618 households were foreclosed in the second quarter of 2008.

Or

0.16% all total U.S. households had an actual foreclosure.

Unfortunately, this figure would not have been in the best interest of the reporting company, thus presenting a more dramatic figure, complete with reporter bias.