Black and blue and underwater
Zillow came out with their quarterly home value index for 161 metro areas and about the only good news is that Charleston isn't black and blue (and bruised) like so many other markets around the country.
Highlights (or lowlights if you prefer) for the Charleston area include an 8.7% decline in the past year with Charleston down 9.9%, Mount Pleasant down 11.3% and Summerville down 6.5%. Buried deep in the report is that foreclosures represented 11.7% of all transactions in the last 12 months. Click here for more.
The big news from Zillow was their pronouncement of how many homeowners are underwater, in other words, owing more than the value of their home. Zillow says that 21.9 million homeowners are underwater at the end of the first quarter, up from 17.6 million at the end of the 4th quarter and 14.3 million at the end of the 3rd quarter in 2008. Read more at WSJ.com.
Zillow CFO Spencer Rascoff was interviewed by CNBC regarding their report and here is a link to the video. There is a 30 second advertisement for a Mother's Day gift of pink pajamas but I'm sure you can do better for Mom than that.
In fact, why don't you buy Mom a new house for Mother's Day. 
