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Two Americas: Half of U.S. homes are worth more than their bubble-era price
But the rebound is uneven with some homeowners experiencing almost no bump in value
Recovery is an uneven game.
Though half of American homeowners have seen their property values climb even higher than they were before the 2008 crash, whether you feel the benefits depends on where you live, according to a new Zillow report cited by MarketWatch. For example, nearly every home in Denver has seen a bump in value, while in Las Vegas only 1 percent of homes saw an increase.
In some of the largest housing markets, over 95 percent of homes are more valuable than their pre-2008 prices. The national median home value is about $217,000, which is 8.4 percent higher than the median value before the crash.
But despite having more than $5.8 trillion in nationwide home equity, echoes of the Great Recession are still making many cautious about borrowing against their homes.
“There’s a long-memory issue,” Dan Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, told Bloomberg. “People got caught with home equity lines last time.”
That said, as The Real Deal reported, new home-equity lines of credit (HELOCs) are beginning to jump, with the number of HELOCs taken out in the first quarter of 2018 up 14 percent compared to the same period in 2017. [MarketWatch]