IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
The number of underwater residential properties in the Inland Empire dropped during the first quarter of this year, another sign of the region’s housing market’s slow but steady improvement.
Overall, 10.2 percent of mortgaged residential properties in Riverside and San Bernardino counties had negative equity at the end of the first quarter, a 3.7 percent decline year-over-year, Irvine-base CoreLogic reported Wednesday.
Compared with the last three months of 2015, negative equity properties in the Inland Empire were down about one percent, according to CoreLogic
Negative equity, often called “underwater” or “upside down,” means more is owed on the mortgage than the property is worth. Properties often fall into that category because of a decline in the value of a home, an increase in mortgage debt or a combination of
both factors.
Nationwide, approximately four million homes were in negative equity at the end of the first quarter, about eight percent of all mortgaged properties in the United States.
Roughly 268,000 homeowners regained equity during the first quarter of 2016, bringing the total number of properties with equity to 46.7 million, or 92 percent of the country’s mortgaged properties, according to CoreLogic.
More than one million U.S. homeowners have gotten out of negative equity during the past year, and that trend is expected to last through this year and into 2017 as home prices continue to go up, said Anand Nallathambi, CoreLogic’s president and chief executive officer, in a statement.
