Thanks to the improving health of the U.S. real estate market, the share of borrowers with negative equity was lower.
During the third quarter of last year, 100,000 borrowers saw their loan-to-value ratios fall below 100 percent.
That brought to 1.4 million the number of mortgages that moved from a negative to a positive equity position during the first nine months of 2012.
The findings were reported Thursday by CoreLogic Inc. The Santa Ana, Calif.-based company utilized its database of 48 million financed properties to determine the statistics.
Mortgages with LTVs still above 100 percent fell to 10.7 million as of Sept. 30 from 10.8 million as of June 30. The most-recent figure worked out to 22 percent of all financed homes.
There were another 2.3 million borrowers who had less than 5 percent equity at the end of September.
On a dollar basis, negative equity worked out to $658 billion, improving from $689 billion at the end of the second quarter.
“This decrease was driven in large part by an improvement in house price levels,” the report said. “This dollar amount represents the total value of all homes currently underwater nationally.”
Included in the third-quarter number was $334 billion in first liens with home-equity loans behind them.
With 57 percent of mortgaged properties underwater, Nevada had the worst rate in the country. Florida wasn’t far behind with 42 percent of its properties upside-down.
Next was Arizona’s 39 percent, Georgia’s 36 percent and Michigan’s 32 percent.
The report indicated that most negative-equity properties are concentrated in low-end housing markets — with 29 percent of homes valued at less than $200,000 above 100 percent LTV and just 15 percent of properties valued at more than $200,000 being in the hole.
Almost $12.5 trillion in homes had $8.7 trillion in mortgages against them, according to the report. The average U.S. LTV ratio was 69.4 percent.
