Nearly a Third of Past Year’s Home Sales Were Losses

Zillow's third quarter Real Estate Market Reports have some interesting findings:

Home values in the United States posted their seventh consecutive quarterly decline, falling 9.7 percent year-over-year to a Zillow Home Value Index of $202,966...

Over the past 12 months, 30.2 percent of homes sold were sold for a loss, up from 23.7 percent at the end of the second quarter...

In 17 markets - 14 of which are in California - more than half of homes sold in the past year were sold for a loss...

One in seven (14.3 percent) of all homeowners across the country has negative equity, and of homeowners who bought in the last five years, almost one-third (29.5 percent) are underwater...

Meanwhile 27 of the 163 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) covered by Zillow's reports are experiencing longer-term impact, showing negative annualized value changes over the past five years, and 12 of the markets show flat five-year annualized returns...

Detroit experienced the worst overall long-term depreciation, with five-year annualized change at -3.1 percent and 10-year annualized change at 0.9 percent...

Foreclosures made up almost one in five (18.6 percent) of all transactions in the past 12 months...

The New York metro area continued to have the lowest rate of foreclosures, with only 3.5 percent of all transactions being foreclosures...

12 of the 163 markets in the report experienced year-over-year change in value of more than 1 percent. Most of the bright spots were in the Carolinas and upstate New York, with the Ithaca, N.Y. area experiencing a year-over-year change of 5.6 percent and the Rochester, N.Y. area seeing a 3.1 percent increase. Home values in the Jacksonville, N.C. area increased 3.9 percent and were up 3.4 percent in Winston-Salem, N.C. None of those markets experienced bubbles, but instead have seen steady year-over-year growth for the past eight years...

But based on the third quarter Real Estate Market Reports, almost three-quarters (74 percent) of all homes lost value in the past year.