Catherine Reagor, The Republic | azcentral
With every monthly gain in home values over the past two years, more metro Phoenix homeowners have come out from underwater on their mortgages. But the recovery has been uneven, with some West Valley areas bouncing back much more slowly than other regions.
Steady home-price increases in 2012 and 2013 have cut the number of underwater homeowners in the Valley by two-thirds, according to the latest data from Zillow, the real-estate database company.
In late 2011, as prices hit bottom in the real-estate crash, more than 60 percent of the Valley’s homeowners with a mortgage owed more on their loans than their houses were worth. A year ago, the underwater count fell to about 40 percent of homeowners.
Now, the number is 22 percent.
