As many of you know, I am a huge advocate of owner financing especially in our current credit situation in our country and getting owner financing is so much easier when the seller has equity to work with.

It is very difficult to have a seller offer owner financing when they owe 100% of what their house is worth and, on the opposite side, it is much easier to make a deal work when a seller has some equity in the property and you can make offers that are creative with that equity.

I’ve been known to share the very limited stats I had–and I forget the exact source where I first heard them–about the number of homes in the United States that are owned without any mortgage on it at all. The stat I would share was that about one third of all the homes in the US were owned free and clear.

When I would share this with real estate agents and brokers I know, they all said, “Really?!” Because the people that tend to buy and sell real estate frequently are usually the ones with loans. To pay off a 30 year mortgage making just the regular payments takes 30 years of staying in the same house and making payments every month. So, real estate agents and brokers tend to see fewer people with homes that are owned free and clear than the stat of one in three suggests, but I just found a great new resource put together by an investor that I know of from a call I listened to.

In his resource, he lists out all the states in the US and what percentage of homes are owned free and clear, which have FHA or VA loans, which have prime or subprime loans. It also shows the foreclosure rate and what part of the homes in foreclosure have what type of loan. It is actually a great little cheat sheet for getting a quick snapshot of the US by state.

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