Everything BUT rates: 10 Important U.S. real estate and mortgage statistics.
If you’re a homeowner, you probably are keeping a close eye on the real estate market, watching your home price carefully as your neighbor’s home sells for top dollar. But there are many other statistics that describe our current mortgage and residential real estate markets, which will prove useful for homeowners, home buyers or sellers, and real estate agents.
In this series, I’ll bring you ten quick facts and stats about our current real estate and home loan landscape, with a few notes to put them in perspective.
Here are today’s 10 interesting, illuminating, and useful stats about mortgages in the U.S.:
1.Total mortgage debt (all home loans including equity loans, second mortgages, etc.) in the United States: $9.9 trillion.
2. However, the level of total residential real estate equity in the U.S. is now $24 trillion, which means we have a combined $13.9 trillion in home equity.
3. The average mortgage balance is now $137,002. While we’re putting less and less down when we first purchase property, we’ve paid down our mortgage balances significantly, to the point that we only owe $137,002 on average.
4. Rate of homeowners with a mortgage loan: 65%
It’s interesting that only about two-thirds of homeowners have any home loan at all. Of course, not everyone who is a homeowner has a mortgage, as a significant percentage of owners either:
- Already paid off their home
- Paid cash for their home
- Received their home mortgage-free in a will, from a loved one, etc.
5. Average balance for new mortgages: $244,0003
A better indicator of the vitality of the current home loan market is the average balance for new home loans that are issued, which is almost a quarter of a million dollars.
6. The current homeownership rate: 63.4%
About 63.4% of all U.S. adults own the home they live in, as opposed to people who rent.
7. That’s one of the most alarming statistics on this list, as 63.4% is uncharacteristically low. In fact, the homeownership rate in 2004 was 69%, an all-time high.
8. These days, the median home buyer that takes out a mortgage puts down 5% of the purchase price. Only a decade ago, the median down payment was 20% in America.
9. Only 1.24% of all mortgages are in delinquency (considered 90-days late or somewhere in the pre-foreclosure or foreclosure process). For context, in 2009, the mortgage delinquency rate in the U.S. was 8.35%!
10. Sometime in the second quarter of 2017, we surpassed the home equity levels enjoyed before the real estate crash and Great Recession. As we mentioned above, U.S. homeowners now have $13.9 trillion in equity, which is the highest level ever.
Look for 10 more important U.S. real estate and mortgage statistics coming soon!