6.4 Million Mortgages Still Underwater

According to new study

Overall the housing news has been good as of late: prices are on the rise, fueled by tight inventory plus lower mortgage rates the first half of the year. Despite those developments, 6.4 million homes remained weighted down by underwater mortgages in Q3 2013, according to a report released today by CoreLogic. That's 13 percent of all residential properties that have a mortgage.

Still, that's about 3/4 million less than were underwater in Q2 of this  year. The total number of homes with underwater mortgages (often called "upside down" or "negative equity" properties, meaning that borrowers owe more on their mortgages than the homes are worth) dropped by 791,000 by the end of Q3, says CoreLogic, a publicly traded data and analytics company. At the end of second quarter 2013, 7.2 million homes with a mortgage, or 14.7 percent, were underwater.