Kansans may be feeling a bit smug in the housing price collapse: “We didn’t go nuts with the mortgage loans.”
Well, not exactly. Some calculations by the First American CoreLogic show that Kansans have an average 73 percent debt to value ratio. That means that of all homes that have mortgages, debt is equal to 73 percent of the value of the average Kansas home. The remainder is the homeowners’ equity, about $10 billion total for all homes in the case of Kansas. It’s a measure of how leveraged (a dirty word these days) we are in Kansas.
What surprised me a bit is that, even though the usual suspects finished worst (Nevada had an 89 percent ratio), Kansas was well above the national average of 66 percent. The company also figured that nearly 15 percent of Kansas homes with a mortgage have negative equity, which means the debt it higher than the home value. That’s a recipe for foreclosure.
That must be in Johnson County because I haven’t heard of much of that here.
One Comment
One reason some states have a lower % ratio is the appreciation of housing prices. If I buy a house at 80% leverage and the value goes up 10% my ration becomes 73% automatically.