Real estate site reflects drop in valley valuations

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

It's not just old-school data companies lining up to deliver the bad news to homeowners anymore. The home valuation site Zillow.com - a favorite online destination of the real-estate-obsessed - is scheduled to release a report today showing home values in the San Jose metro area fell 8 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier.

The Seattle-based company, which provides online estimates of the value of more than 80 million homes nationwide, also calculated that nearly half of the people who bought homes in Santa Clara County in 2006 were "upside down" in the first quarter, or owed more money to their mortgage lenders than their homes were worth.

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