HOUSING DOOM: 27% of US Homeowners Underwater (up from 23%) !!!

From CNN Money & Bloomberg:

-- 27% of homeowners with mortgages owe more than their homes are worth. That's up from 23.2% a quarter earlier. About 15.7 million homeowners had negative equity (i.e., were underwater), at the end of the year, up from 13.9 million in the previous three months.

-- Home prices dropped 2.6% nationwide during the last three months of 2010, pushing more borrowers underwater, according to a quarterly real estate market survey from Zillow.com.

-- More than one-third of all homes were sold at a loss in December. That trend has been on a steady uptick for the past six months, as homeowners try to find ways around foreclosure or out from under their homes.

-- Values will fall as much as 5 percent this year, putting more homeowners underwater.

-- The median value for a U.S. single-family home was $175,200 in the fourth quarter, down 2.6 percent from the end of September and 5.9 percent from a year earlier, according to Zillow. Values have fallen 27 percent from the June 2006 peak.

-- According to Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist: “These seem like fairly grim numbers. We’re still expecting a bottom in home values later this year. And this, if anything, makes me a bit more confident because I’m seeing very large corrections now, which means the market can start to repair itself.”

[link to money.cnn.com]

[link to noir.bloomberg.com]