These 11 metro areas have the highest percentage of underwater homes

Advertisement

underwater picture

Reuters/Charles Platiau

A diver takes pictures as people look at sharks from an underwater room structure installed in the Aquarium of Paris, France.

The burst of the housing bubble led to quite a few homes with negative equity, and in some areas of the country, that hasn't changed.

Advertisement

Negative equity occurs when a home owner owes more on their loan then their home is worth. When the housing bubble burst, a lot of home owners found themselves with negative equity, also known as being underwater.

"For years, Las Vegas has been the prime example of the housing bubble and bust, with nearly three-quarters of mortgaged homeowners underwater when the market bottomed out in in the first quarter of 2012," Zillow said in its recent Negative Equity Report.

"But Chicago now has the highest negative equity rate among large U.S. markets, surpassing Las Vegas in the first quarter of 2016."

The number of underwater homes started to thin in recent years, but several markets in the United States are not faring as well as others.

Advertisement

Read on to see which metro areas have the highest rate of underwater homes.