Dataset of the Day: Foreclosures on the Rise

October 22nd, 2009by Emily Sciarillo

Although there are some signs that the economy is on its way to recovery, the foreclosure rate is not one of them. The most recent data from RealtyTrac show that rates are at an all time high. In the third quarter of 2009, one in every 136 homes in the U.S. were foreclosed on. This is the highest quarterly rate since the housing crisis began. The third quarter rates increased five percent from the previous quarter and almost 23 percent from Q3 2008. It has been speculated that instead of forclosures resulting from bad loans, these new foreclosures are due to increasing unemployment and are a result of a bad economy.

Because many datasets in Finder! are regularly updated, it is easy to access the most current data as well as historic datasets for analysis or to make maps using Maker!. I thought I would use some of the updated and historic datasets on foreclosures to get a better picture of the foreclosure situation.

After searching for the most recent dataset for foreclosures as well as datasets from past months, I have created some maps to demonstrate how foreclosures have shifted geographically. The following set of maps shows the foreclosure rates overtime starting in February 2008. Note that each map is drawn to a different scale so that comparisons between states for each month are emphasized. Foreclosure Rates represent the number of foreclosures filed for every X housing units.

A closer examination of the scales for each month help to illuminate how rates have increased overall. The lower the number, the more foreclosures there are relative to homes.

Next I used Finder’s historic unemployment data to see if a relationship between unemployment and foreclosures can be geographically visualized. To compare unemployment rates with foreclosure rates, I have provided for a year lapse from job lost to foreclosure to allow for 6 months of unemployment benefits and 6 months of non payment before the house is foreclosed on.

The first map shows the 12 month change in unemployment rates from August 2007 to August 2008 by county. This map shows where jobs had been lost in the end of 2007 to the beginning and middle of 2008. The white counties are where unemployment actually decreased. The second map shows foreclosure rates for the third quarter of 2009. The darker green states have had the most foreclosures in the past quarter. The maps show that some regions do have both high unemployment from the previous year and high foreclosure rates. Of course any conclusion of direct causation can not be drawn from these maps, however, the two factors do seem to be occuring together geographically.

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4 Responses to “Dataset of the Day: Foreclosures on the Rise”

  1. Kyle McMullin Says:
    October 26th, 2009 at 11:50 am

    This is an interesting presentation. The hard thing fro me is to figure out which states are increasing and which are decreasing. It would be nice to have a color scale of pink if it the rate is increasing within its previous color and light blue if decreasing within its previous color and Red if it is increasing from one color group to another and Blue if it is decreasing from one color group to another.

    Then we can visually track as the foreclosures change from one group to another.

  2. Bill Greer Says:
    November 11th, 2009 at 10:59 am

    Thats a great idea. All of the foreclosure datasets contain change from the previous month and the same month the previous year so that could be displayed using one of the color ramps that have two colors and then manually adjust the scale so as to show all the negatives in one color and the positives in the other. Feel free to play around with that in Maker. Thanks for the suggestion.

  3. Dataset of the Day: Foreclosures by County | Off the Map - Official Blog of FortiusOne Says:
    December 1st, 2009 at 9:09 am

    […] few weeks ago I did a blog on the country’s foreclosure rates. For that blog I made maps that showed those rates at the […]

  4. Foreclosure Says:
    December 2nd, 2009 at 4:33 pm

    Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post,and very informative.

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