One Quarter Of Mortgage Holders Underwater

About one quarter of all mortgage holders in the US are underwater and this number is expected to continue to climb according to reports by Zillow and Deutsche Bank. This could put downward pressure on prices as homeowners and investors look to unload their negative equity. The following post from Blown Mortgage discusses these negative numbers.

Two reports out say if you’re thinking of buying, wait. The prices are going to continue to drop. The reason they offer are the same: Continuing increases in the number of homes worth less than their current mortgages.

Zillow reports that 23% of US mortgage holders owed more than their homes were worth in the second quarter of this year. This number is challenged, but not in a good way, by Deutsche Bank which says it’s actually 26%.

Both numbers are a stark contrast to recent upbeat spins on real estate news. National Association of Realtors report that pending home sales rose for a fifth straight month in June. (Remember, the NAR’s last chief economist admitted lying about his numbers.) And the most recent Case-Schiller numbers which were widely misreported as showing a price increase in May.

While the Zillow report makes the relatively sure prediction that underwater mortgages will increase to 30% by mid-2010, DB goes all in and says it will be 48% by 2011.

This will further decrease prices as it increase the amount of housing for sale. There were 3.8 million homes for sale in June which take 9.4 months to sell at the current pace of transactions, and those numbers are from the ever-optimistic NAR.

The number of homes for sale doesn’t (and perhaps can’t) include the huge number of shadow homes out there. These are homes being kept off the market by banks, investors and individual owners waiting for prices to improve before putting them on the market. “If” prices continue to descend look to these folks to hit the market in a big way as they try to get anything back on their investments. This, of course, will further depress the price of homes. That’s a helluva catch, that Catch-22.

This post has been republished from Blown Mortgage.