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A growing number of Portland homeowners were able to breathe a sigh of relief last year as their underwater properties returned to the surface.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, 2,137 homes in the Portland-Hillsboro-Vancouver, Wash. area returned to positive equity, according to new information from CoreLogic, a real estate data provider. In total, 84,694 of all residential properties with a mortgage were in negative equity – a 0.5 percent drop to 17.7 percent.

Nationwide, approximately 200,000 properties returned to positive equity during the fourth quarter of 2012. Overall, 10.4 million U.S. residential property owners, or 21.5 percent of those with a mortgage, owed more on their homes than they were worth.

Of the 38.1 million residential properties in positive territory, 2.3 million were in near-negative (less than 5 percent) equity. Those properties are considered to be at risk in the event that home prices fall.

In Portland, the number of properties in near-negative equity increased slightly from 26,737 to 27,035, or 5.7 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage. Lori Guyton, a spokeswoman for CoreLogic, said that trend isn’t surprising.

As prices improve and properties leave negative equity, they tend to enter the near-negative equity bracket before rising to healthy levels. – Lee Fehrenbacher