Together, borrowers with negative equity or near-negative equity accounted for 27.1 percent of all residential properties with mortgages in the third quarter.
Among the 6.3 million primary U.S. mortgages without home equity, the average loan balance is $222,000, CoreLogic says. Those mortgages are underwater by an average of $52,000, for a loan-to-value ratio of 131 percent.
Most homeowners, of course, are in no danger of drowning. For those who can continue to make payments on time and aren't planning to refinance, negative equity is just another number.
In fact, unless you live on a street where every house but yours is in foreclosure, your equity - though perhaps less than it was in 2007, at the peak of housing's boom - still exists.
In the eight-county Philadelphia region, CoreLogic reports, 70,615 residential properties with mortgages, or 7.9 percent, had negative equity in the third quarter, compared with 7.7 percent, or 69,658 properties, in the second quarter.
An additional 3.7 percent, or 33,657 residential properties, were in near-negative equity for the third quarter, compared with 3.8 percent, or 33,978, in the second.
While unsettling, the region's number looks tame compared with the nation's - and the U.S. percentage has declined 2 points since peaking at 24 percent in fourth quarter 2009.
Locally, the "underwater" housing stock has remained fairly consistent since the end of 2009, when CoreLogic began tracking Philadelphia-area numbers. Stated another way, 66,000 to 70,000 of the region's homeowners with mortgages have owed more than the value of their houses since 2009.
In Nevada, one of the states hit hardest by the housing bust, the proportion of underwater loans peaked at 70 percent in 2009; it has fallen to 58 percent, or seven times the level here, where there are more houses with mortgages.
