What’s it take to be in the home equity elite?

Kenneth R. Harney on Aug 25, 2017

WASHINGTON — Americans readily gossip about home values — “Did you hear the crazy high price the house down the street sold for?” “Did you hear how little our neighbors were forced to take on their sale?”

But people are much more reticent when it comes to home equity, which is not surprising: Prices and assessed values are public information. Equity holdings are not public, and they take some effort to figure out. Equity is intimate financial information, like a bank account or retirement fund balances, and represents a major part of most owners’ net worth.

So it tends to be closely held.

All of which makes a new statistical report on the equity levels of owners of more than 150 million homes with mortgages intriguing. The report comes from ATTOM Data Solutions, a research and analytics firm that tracks equity movements on a quarterly basis using public property information and proprietary automated valuation systems. According to ATTOM researchers, 34 percent of all American homeowners have 100 percent equity in their properties — they’ve either paid off their entire mortgage debt or they never had a mortgage.

Equity is the difference between the current market value of your home and the debt you’ve got against it. If you own a $400,000 house and your mortgage debt is $150,000, you’ve got $250,000 in equity. During the five years following the housing bust in 2007, when the real estate recovery began taking hold, American homeowners lost billions of dollars in equity. But today many have recouped all or most of it, and the Federal Reserve estimates that homeowners now control an astounding $1.37 trillion in equity wealth.

The latest ATTOM report opens a window on equity — where and in what types of homes equity holdings are especially large and where they tilt negative, with property values well below what owners could expect to get from a sale.

Some quick highlights: