A Holiday Gift for Foreclosure Nerds

When we ran this story in August, looking at the foreclosure mess in Chula Vista, we used some data from RealtyTrac that showed how many individual homes had entered at least one stage of foreclosure in the first six months of the year.

We’ve since updated that feature to include foreclosures through the end of October. In that time, the county average for foreclosures per 1,000 homes has more than doubled, rising from about 12 to about 32 now.

The top few ZIPs for foreclosures per 1,000 homes are as follows:

Check it out:

A couple of points of explanation on how we compile these numbers:

RealtyTrac gives us the raw numbers for how many homes were in some stage of foreclosure from January through the end of October. The firm counts each house only once for this data set, even if a house passed through the NOD (notice of default), NOS (notice of sale/auction), and REO (real-estate-, or bank-, owned) stages in that time.

We ask them to strip out multiple counts on the same house so that we can get a feel for how many individual houses the foreclosure wave is affecting.

Then we take the housing count per ZIP code — total houses, not just those for sale — from DataQuick Information Systems. We parse out ZIPs that have fewer than 100 homes.

(Still, a code like 92066, the town of Ranchita near Anza-Borrego Desert, ends up in the top 10 of foreclosures-per-1,000 homes because there were seven foreclosure-homes among the ZIP’s 100 homes.)

For one ZIP, I’m still sleuthing its house total. The RealtyTrac total foreclosures for ZIP 92058 in Oceanside approached 200, while the DataQuick total house count for 92058 was one house.

Let me know if you run across any bugs.

— KELLY BENNETT