Twenty Percent of Seattle Homeowners Underwater

That's the stat that jumped out at us from the Seattle Times story on our woozy real estate market; they went with "Nearly 30 percent of all homes sold at a loss at the end of 2008." So says Zillow's quarterly home value report. The King Country assessor's office data shows that "Most homes bought since mid-2005 and sold during the last three months of 2008 fetched lower prices than their owners paid." But that twenty percent underwater worries us because that's a sizable chunk who no longer have the recourse of being able to tap home equity in an emergency.