Mortgage Data Firm Oversold Doom and Gloom: Affected Retail Sales

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[From November 2009]

Doom and Gloomers Caught! CoreLogic admitted today in a Los Angles Times article, Oops: Mortgage data firm overestimated ‘underwater’ loans that “23% of all residential properties with mortgages were underwater in the third quarter.” That’s far below the 33.8% that would have appeared to be upside down on their loans previously.”

That means they were off by 30%!!!

The article went on to say, “The corrections may cause some head-scratching and hand-wringing in newsrooms, at fair-lending groups and in legislative hearing rooms, where the CoreLogic data has been widely cited as an indicator of the severity of the mortgage meltdown. Testimony to Congress, for example, may have been overstated.”

Do you know what this does to consumer confidence? What it has done to businesses looking to try to get a handle on demand and inventory?

I’m not saying to take a Pollyanna approach to this, of course there are deep troubles but the breathless anticipation of bad news is ruining the entire attitude of the country; whether you are on the left, right or center.

Take all retail holiday sales news with a grain of salt over the next five weeks.  Just like the mortgage data that were overly focused on the negative, it isn’t going to be pretty but it pretty well isn’t going to be accurate either.

Fight for your customers by focusing on them, not the news hounds looking to make holiday retail sales into the next American Idol skirmish.

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