Good grief: A quarter of new home buyers in Tampa Bay area have no equity in homes

Here's a new way to slice and dice the recent housing slump. The housing tracking firm Zillow keeps tabs on how many of us homeowners have "negative equity" in our homes we've bought the past year.

Negative equity is a fancy term for "I owe more money on my house than my house is worth."

Anyway, nationally the percentage of recently bought homes with negative equity is 15 percent. but in Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater it's 25.4 percent.

While that's bad news, things are MUCH worse in places like Las Vegas and Stockton, Merced and Sacramento, Cal. About 72 percent of Merced homes bought the past year have negative equity.

Zillow has published more interesting details on this Web site. It shows, for example, that homeowners in our area typically have about 9 percent equity in our homes. In other words, we still owe the bank 91 percent of the home's value.