Three-quarters of a Million Borrowers Achieved Positive Equity Over the Past 12 Months

• National share of homes with negative equity fell to 5.4 percent in Q2 2017.
• Homeowner equity more than doubled in the past five years.
• Nevada saw the largest improvement in the negative equity share over the past year, falling 4.8 percentage points.

The amount of equity in mortgaged real estate increased by $403 billion in Q2 2017 compared with Q1 2017, and increased by $766.1 billion between Q2 2016 and Q2 2017, according to the latest CoreLogic Equity Report. Homeowner equity has more than doubled in five years, increasing by $4.2 trillion from Q2 2012 to Q2 2017[1]. The nationwide negative equity share for Q2 2017 was 5.4 percent of all homes with a mortgage, more than 20 percentage points lower than the peak negative equity share – 26 percent – recorded in Q4 2009.[2]  Over the past 12 months, 788,000 borrowers moved into positive equity.

The improvement in negative equity has been national, with all but one state registering a year-over-year decrease in Q2 2017 (New York saw a small increase of 0.3 percentage points). Figure 1 shows the 25 states with the largest percentage-point change in the negative equity share from the previous year. Nevada’s 4.8-percentage-point decrease between Q2 2016 and Q2 2017 represented the nation’s largest year-over-year decline, and the drop from a high of 72.7 percent in Q1 2010 to 10.6 percent in Q2 2017 represented the largest decline from the peak.

Figure 2 shows the average dollar amount of negative equity and the negative equity share for 10 large Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) in Q2 2017. The average amount of negative equity is inversely related to the negative equity share. For example, in this group of CBSAs, San Francisco has the largest average amount of negative equity, but the negative equity share is only 0.6 percent, and Miami has the smallest average amount of negative equity, but has a negative equity share that is nearly three times the national average.

^[1] Homeowner equity in this report reflects only mortgaged single-family real estate.

^[2] CoreLogic began reporting negative equity in Q3 2009.

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