Tracking Individuals Pre- and Post-Foreclosure

Christos Makridis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management

Michael Ohlrogge
New York University School of Law

Disclaimer
All opinions expressed here are strictly those of the authors and do not reflect the views of affiliated organizations or the U.S. Government.

In this article, the authors examine how it is possible to construct records that track 1.4 million households that experience foreclosure from their pre-foreclosure to post-foreclosure residences. These records were created by merging two powerful sets of data: county registrar of deeds records (licensed from CoreLogic, Inc.) and consumer mail marketing data (licensed from RefUSA). The article starts with a description of the county registrar of deeds data and how it can be used to create a dataset of mortgages and outcomes (including foreclosure). The authors proceed to describe the nature of the consumer marketing data from RefUSA, how it can be used to track households as they move locations, and then how that data can be merged with the mortgage records constructed from registrar of deeds data. The article also includes discussions of how those combined records can be merged with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) database, using GIS software, to learn additional demographic information (income, race, and so on) about individuals with mortgages and foreclosures.