Nearly 29% of mortgaged homes underwater, report finds

By Jane Hodges

A whopping 28.6 percent of homeowners with mortgages owe more on their loans than their homes could sell for, according to quarterly data released Tuesday by Zillow, a real estate website. That's up from 26.8 percent in the second quarter. Home values declined only 0.2 percent from the second quarter but were down 4.4 percent year over year.

The rising percentage of homes with "negative equity" or "underwater" status is due largely to how long the foreclosure sale process takes rather than home value fluctuations, said Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries. Prior to the "robo-signing" scandal around foreclosures that came to light in 2010, the negative equity rate hovered in the 21 to 23 percent range, but has been in the 26 to 28 range since due to added delays in foreclosure sales. While the rate of foreclosures is dropping, the time required for foreclosures to sell has lengthened.

"We're in uncharted waters," Humphries said in an interview. "More than one in four homes underwater and about 9 percent unemployment is a recipe for more foreclosures."

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>Nearly half of mortgages in Chicago area underwater
By Mary Ellen Podmolik
A little more than 46 percent of all single-family homes with a mortgage in the Chicago area were underwater in the year's third quarter, far more than the nation as a whole.

The percentage of homes in the Chicago area with negative equity, meaning more is owed on the mortgage than the value of the underlying property, rose 9 percent from the second quarter, according to a report scheduled to be released Tuesday by real estate website Zillow. Nationally, 28.6 percent of homes with mortgages were underwater at the end of September.

"I didn't think this was a particularly bad housing report," said Stan Humphries, Zillow's chief economist. "We are much closer to the end of the housing recession than the beginning. I still think of Chicago being more of an average case of housing recession. It's nowhere in the league of Phoenix and Vegas."

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