Texas homeowners gained an average of $9,000 in home equity last year.
It's part of a national upswing that saw the biggest year-to -year jump in equity since 2013.
About 700,000 borrowers nationwide are no longer under water on their mortgages. About 4.9 percent of borrowers, or 2.5 million, still owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.
The sharp rise in home values last year gave Texans a potentially strong infusion of cash -- in the form of home equity.
In Texas, then, some homeowners are seeing the home-price growth and cashing in.
For some national context, the average U.S. homeowner gained about $15,000 in home equity last year.
Collectively, that's $908 billion in total value.
Home-equity wealth will add about $50 billion dollars to U.S. consumption spending over the next three years, according to a report by CNBC.
"Home-price growth has been the primary driver of home-equity wealth creation," Frank Nothaft, chief economist at CoreLogic, told the business news channel. "Because wealth gains spur additional consumer purchases, the rise in home-equity wealth during 2017 should add more than $50 billion to U.S. consumption spending over the next two to three years."