Home is Where the Equity Is
Equity is back in American homes, but that doesn’t mean people are moving. In fact, part of the reason many Americans have equity is because they’ve been staying put.
“Close to 1 in every 5 U.S. homeowners with a mortgage is now equity-rich thanks to a combination of rising home prices and lengthening homeownership tenures,” says Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions, the new parent company of RealtyTrac.
ATTOM defines “equity rich” as those with a loan-to-value ratio of 50 percent or less, and that number has grown to 13.1 million, or roughly one-quarter of the homeowner population in the U.S.
What does that mean for your average homeowner? A report from S&P/CoreLogic says that homeowner wealth has more than doubled since 2011, ballooning from $6.1 trillion to $12.7 trillion. That breaks down to an extra $11,000 per homeowner on average. On the West Coast, that figure is nearly three times greater, about $30,000 for homeowners in California, Oregon or Washington.
Similarly, according to ATTOM’s data of equity-rich homeowners, California is home to the most equity-rich homeowners at 2.9 million, or 35.7 percent, though by share it comes in at No. 2 behind Hawaii, where nearly 37.9 percent are equity rich, though that’s only 103,904 people. The top five states with the most equity-rich homeowners were California (2.9 million), Florida (1.3 million), Texas (996,000), New York (713,000) and Pennsylvania (489,000).
States with the highest share of equity-rich homeowners as a share of all homeowners with a mortgage were Hawaii (37.9 percent), California (35.7 percent), Vermont (32.9 percent), New York (32.2 percent) and Oregon (30.2 percent).
And here’s another piece of good news for homeowners: The distribution of those who are considered seriously underwater has retreated to 6 million—more than half of the 12.8 figure when it peaked in 2012.
