Third quarter numbers have been released to the press with yet again many articles offering more conflicting numbers. Depending on the source of the foreclosure data, most likely readers will see a variety of figures reflecting the current state of the foreclosure market.

The first of these articles comes from CNNMoney.com titled, “81,312 homes lost to foreclosure in September.” The article published on October 23, 2008 by Catherine Clifford offers figures from Realty Trac, an Irvine, CA based listing company.

As stated in the headline, there were 81,312 foreclosures during the month of September. The article continues by stating that according to their information, foreclosures actually decreased 12% from August to September. While this figure may have been even more newsworthy for a headline than total month foreclosures, it was not given the attention it deserved and shuffled into the bulk of the article.

However, an even larger number that surprisingly was not utilized in the headline, was that pre-foreclosures, or foreclosure filings, totaled 765,558 for the entire third quarter of 2008.

On the other end of the media spectrum, there are a whole slew of similar foreclosure articles with a wide disparity in figures. One of these articles comes from Market Watch in a press release titled, “U.S. Foreclosures Index Shows More Than 107,500 Homes Lost in September.” The article written by Sofia Gutierrez provides figures from ForeclosureS.com, a competing foreclosure listing service.

The titles alone show a difference in foreclosure figures for the previous month. Contrary to the first article, ForeclosureS.com reported 107,500 foreclosures for the month of September. Continuing through the article, the decrease from August to September is also different. While Realty Trac reported a decrease of 12%, ForeclosureS.com reported a decrease of only 2.4%, both numbers reflecting foreclosure filings for the same period of time. Total foreclosure filings for the third quarter are also different. ForeclosureS.com reported a total of 561,467 filings, a difference of 204,091 total filings!

The difference in total foreclosures for the month of September is also disconcerting. The difference between total foreclosures from both foreclosure listing companies is a whopping 26,000 foreclosures! A difference of 26,000 owners losing their homes is almost as large as the amount of total foreclosures for the entire state of Florida for the entire month of September.

In statistics, a variance of nearly 25% would make the findings inconclusive. However, while the difference in foreclosure flings and total foreclosures were both 25% between companies, readers could simply use the 25% figure as a permanent margin of error when reading foreclosure reports from the usual suspects.