Although the amount of home loans outstanding expanded in the latest quarter, the value of the properties securing them was up by an even greater amount.
Mortgage debt outstanding ended the third quarter of this year at $8.997 trillion. That was more than the $8.926 trillion outstanding as of the prior quarter.
The nation’s home loans outstanding have increased by even more when compared to the same quarter of last year, a period when the total was $8.751 trillion.
CoreLogic Inc. reported the statistics in its Equity Report Third Quarter 2015.
Total outstandings left U.S. borrowers with $6.793 trillion in equity, more than the $6.633 trillion as of the second quarter and the $6.052 trillion as of the third-quarter 2014.
Mortgages in the United States had an average loan-to-value ratio of 57.0 percent as of the third quarter of this year.
Borrower equity improved slightly from the previous three-month period, when the average U.S. LTV ratio was an upwardly revised 57.4 percent.
The average LTV as of the same three-month period in 2014 was an upwardly revised 59.1 percent.
In Arkansas, the average LTV ratio was 70.5 percent — the highest of any state. Next was Nevada’s 69.5 percent, then Oklahoma’s 68.8 percent, Nebraska’s 68.4 percent and Arizona’s 67.1 percent.
The lowest LTV ratio in the nation was in Hawaii: 43.4 percent. Close behind was 45.2 percent in New York, followed by 49.8 percent in California, 51.8 percent in Massachusetts and 53.1 percent in Washington, D.C.
U.S. mortgage borrowers collectively had $741 billion more in equity as of the most-recent period than in the year-prior period.
In the third-quarter 2015, there were 256,000 U.S. properties that moved from negative to positive equity — bringing to 46.3 million the number of financed properties with LTV ratios less than 100 percent.
Based on property value, 95 percent of homes valued at more than $200,000 had positive equity, while the share dropped to 87 percent on homes valued at less than $200,000.
Negative-equity properties declined by 0.2 million on a quarter-over-quarter basis to 4.1 million.
There was a 1.1 million reduction on a year-over-year basis.
The amount of negative equity on those homes was $301 billion, down $8 billion from the second quarter and plunging $40 billion from the third-quarter 2014.
Of the latest total, 3.1 million of negative-equity borrowers held a first lien but had no home-equity loan.
