Home › Blogs › Cheryl Bourland's blog ›

Nearly 90% of Properties Have Positive Equity

Submitted by Cheryl Bourland on June 18, 2015 - 12:39pm

New data released by CoreLogic in their latest equity report show more good news for the U.S. housing market. In the last quarter of 2014, 5.4 million homes (10.8% of mortgages) had negative equity. However, in the first quarter of 2015, consistently rising home prices resulted in 254,000 properties regaining positive equity status, bringing the percentage of negative-equity homes down to 10.2%. This increase in wealth represents a hopeful trend for both the housing market and the economy as a whole.

While the trend nation-wide is positive, there is a large amount of variation regarding home equity between states. In fact, just five states together accounted for over 30% of all mortgages with negative equity:

 

 

States With Highest Percentage of Mortgages With Negative Equity

 

  1. Nevada: 23.1%
  2. Florida: 21.2%
  3. Illinois: 16.8%
  4. Arizona: 16.8%
  5. Rhode Island: 15.7%

 

Conversely, mortgages in other states are close to 100% positive equity status:

 

States With Highest Percentage of Mortgages With Positive Equity

  1. Texas: 97.7%
  2. Hawaii: 96.9%
  3. Alaska: 96.8%
  4. Montana: 96.8%
  5. North Dakota: 96.2%

 

There is also variation in equity status between different price ranges of the housing market. Higher-end properties are the most likely to be in positive territory, with 94% of homes valued at greater than $200,000 possessing positive equity. On the other hand, only 85% of houses worth less than $200,000 have positive equity.

CoreLogic CEO Anand Nallathambi is hopeful about the continuing trend, saying “With the economy improving and home owners building equity, albeit slowly, the potential exists for an increase in housing stock available for sale, which would ease the current imbalance in supply and demand. There are still about 5 million home owners who are underwater and we estimate that a further 5 percent appreciation in home values across the U.S. would reduce the number of owners with negative equity by about one million.”

 

Source: Report: 90% of Properties Now Have Equity