St. Louis Real Estate News: Over 15 percent of St Louis homeowners with a mortgage are underwater

Dennis Norman

According to a report released today by First American CoreLogic nearly 10.7 million U.S. mortgages, or 23 percent of all mortgaged properties, are in a negative equity position meaning the borrowers owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth as of September 30, 2009.  

Here in St. Louis, as of September 30, 2009, there were 87,557 homeowners in St. Louis that were “underwater” on their mortgage, meaning they owe more than their home is worth.  This works out to 15.14 percent of the homeowners in St. Louis with a mortgage, so about 2/3 of the national rate.

If you read my post about CoreLogics 2nd quarter negative-equity report for St. Louis  in August, this may sound like a huge decrease in underwater loans from the 29.50 percent reported then. Unfortunately, that is not the case, it is actually a change of methodology by CoreLogic: they now a model that factors in loan amortization and utilization rates for home equity lines of credit and feel they are now providing a more precise view of “underwater borrowers”. If this report was done using the same methodology as the August report then the percentage of borrowers underwater would have increased to 29.90 percent.

The table below shows the negative equity rates for each State as well as loan to value ratio.  Missouri as a state is doing better than the national rate as well as St. Louis with negative equity at 13.8 percent.  Missouri is even with the National average for loan to value at 70 percent.