According to the most recent foreclosure news articles foreclosure have once again reached record highs- now said to be in the millions. RealtyTrac’s semiannual report was recently released titled, “1.9 Million foreclosure filings reported on more than 1.5 million U.S. Properties in first half of 2009.” At least the foreclosure listing company correctly assessed the records as foreclosure filings rather than simply ‘foreclosures’ as many reporters incorrectly state.

RealtyTrac also provides some additional information in the headline, which makes our job much easier, which is specifying 1.5 million homes received a foreclosure filing rather than 1.9. In other words, for once the company was being transparent in the fact that there were roughly 400,000 duplicate foreclosure filings in the last six month.

According to the article, Florida is said to have the second highest foreclosure rate in the country. In order to gain a better understanding of the actual foreclosure or REO market it’s imperative to gather additional information such as the number of actual bank repossessions rather than simply default notices.

The RealtyTrac report states that over the last six months there have been 268,064 foreclosure filings in Florida which account for 1 in 33 homeowners receiving a notice. In order to gather bank repossessions for the last six months (which is not available in the latest report) Foreclosure Research calculated these figures from prior month’s reports. The following is a breakdown of those figures.

Florida REOs
January 5,594
February 5,972
March 4,322
April 6,114
May 6,045
June 7,367
Total: 35,414
Housing Units: 8,718,385

Based on past months’ figures, there were 35,414 foreclosures or bank repossessions in Florida. Factoring in U.S. Census housing data, this would account for 1 in 246 bank repossessions rather than 1 in 33.

One could then deduce that foreclosures account for only 13% of the foreclosure filings or 0.4% of Florida housing units. This estimate may be the reason the report does not mention REO data as the total foreclosure filings are an undeniably larger number at 268,064, presumably meant to instill shock in the readership base.