Right about the time the housing market began to turn last year, it appears that homeowners lost equity for the first time in a decade.
According to CoreLogic, U.S. homeowners with mortgages (roughly 63 percent of all properties) saw their equity decrease by a total of $108.4 billion since the first quarter of 2022, a loss of 0.7 percent year-over-year. In the first quarter of 2023, U.S. homeowners with a mortgage lost a small amount of equity year-over-year for the first time since early 2012.
As in the fourth quarter of 2022, Western states posted the largest annual home equity losses, with Washington down $74,300, California down $59,600 and Utah down$37,700.
In the first quarter of 2023, the total number of mortgaged residential properties with negative equity was unchanged from the fourth quarter of 2022, representing 1.2 million homes, or 2.1 percent of all mortgaged properties. On a year-over-year basis, negative equity rose by 4 percent to 1.1 million homes, or 2 percent of all mortgaged properties, in the first quarter of 2023.
The CoreLogic HPI Forecast projects that home prices will increase by 4.6 percent from March 2023-March 2024.