Foreclosure Stats – Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full?
By Foreclosure-Fighter Staff Writer
We’ve all heard of the expression that you can look at things as if “the glass is half-empty” or as if “the glass is half-full.” With that said, this saying could be appropriately applied to the foreclosure statistics for the month of September.
If you're not a statistician or a mathematician, statistics can be quite hard to interpret, especially when they can be looked at in a positive or a negative light.
Here's a great example. If you followed the headlines for California-based Realty-Trac's foreclosure statistics for last month, you might have been confused. For example, one headline on DSNews.com specifically stated that: "Foreclosure Filings Drop Slightly in September."
Upon just reading this headline, you may have been given the impression that the current foreclosure crisis, while still going, was improving at least somewhat.
However, upon reading another headline, "Foreclosures Up Nearly 100% From Last Year," you may not necessarily have had that impression of improvement anymore.
Basically, when it comes to reading headlines about foreclosure statistics, the lesson is to dig deeper. Most often, there are always two or more ways to look at things, so it's always a good idea to look for more context in order to get a better understanding of the numbers that are being thrown at you.
By reading the article with the headline, "Foreclosure Filings Drop Slightly in September," you would have learned that there were 223,538 foreclosure filings last month and that this total was 8 percent less than the numbers for this past August. This obviously seems like a good thing.
However, that article also tells you that foreclosure filings for September 2007 were 99 percent higher than the foreclosure totals for September of 2006. So while there was slight improvement, foreclosure totals for this year are still well ahead of the figures for last year at this time, a bad thing to say the least. It's funny how this fact was part of a secondary clause in the first sentence of this article and then a headline in another article.
Ultimately, this example provides a glimpse at the power of headlines, how putting a positive versus a negative spin can impact one's opinions or thoughts on a topic and more importantly draw people into reading a story. In simple terms, it's all about grabbing one's attention when writing headlines.
When it comes to interpreting statistics, especially with foreclosures, it's always smart to read an article in its entirety and then find a couple of different articles on the same topic.
Comparing different versions of essentially the same topic that is being covered will help you find what's at the heart of the matter-the information that is shared in all of the stories-and likely give you a better interpretation of what the numbers are and mean to you!