Lennar Resource Center

According to RealtyTrac’s 2015 U.S. Home Sales Report, released last week, home sellers experienced an average price gain of 11% last year since the purchase of their home. That was the largest price gain for home sellers since 2007. This Bloomberg article from Steve Matthews highlights some of the details of the RealtyTrac report findings, as well as a Federal Reserve report on rising home’ equity.

Home-price appreciation is a welcome development for households whose nest eggs were shattered by the residential real-estate bust that began a decade ago.

The 2006-2009 housing slump reduced wealth by $7 trillion. Since then, the value of homeowners’ equity in real estate has more than doubled from a low in the first quarter of 2009, a Federal Reserve report showed. What’s more, housing wealth is poised to reach a new record as early as the second quarter, say economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Pantheon Macroeconomics Ltd.

Some cities, including Charlotte, are already seeing prices at all-time highs. Home values in Dallas, Denver, and San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, all hit records in December, while they’re down less than 1 percent in Boston from an August peak, according to S&P/Case-Shiller indexes. About 38 percent of 87 U.S. metropolitan areas were in record territory last year, data tracker RealtyTrac figures show.

Foreclosures were filed on just 95,186 properties in January, an almost 10-year low, RealtyTrac data show.

Even in the worst-hit markets, home equity is being restored. Just 8.5 percent of properties had so-called negative equity in the fourth quarter, with debt exceeding their value, according to a report Thursday by consumer analytics firm CoreLogic Inc.

The number of homeowners with at least 20 percent equity is “rising rapidly,” Anand Nallathambi, president and chief executive officer of CoreLogic, said in a statement. “In 2016, we expect home equity levels to continue to build.”

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