(MONROE, WA) — This housing thing. What are ya gonna do? Everywhere you turn somebody’s singing the blues about the homestead.

Take wrestling star Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea, a bass player in a band before he started crunching bones and cracking heads). Hulk has this gorgeous mansion in Bel Air Florida he’s been trying to sell – since 2006.

The 17,000-sq ft mansion was first listed for $25 million in 2006. But with no buyers and a nasty divorce in the works with ex-wife Linda, Hogan took the French country style mansion off the market until 2009. It was then re-listed at a paltry $13.9 Million.

And it gets uglier for the Hulkster. Despite that huge price reduction, the home has seen four more price cuts and is now sitting on the market priced at $10.9 million – 58 percent below the original 2006 listing price.

And he’s not alone. New figures out by the web based real estate tracker Zillow.com shows the owners of one-third of the houses in the Seattle metro area now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

Ouch.

That’s up from less than 23 percent a year ago, according to Zillow in a report released Wednesday.

The report shows at the end of 2010, 34.3% of all single-family homeowners in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties were “underwater” (as they say) on their homes. That was higher than the national figure, 27 percent.

This region’s rate of increase over the past year — and especially over the last quarter — also topped the national increase.

Zillow claims that “negative equity” is rising faster now in the Seattle area because of where the area is at in the housing cycle – meaning the lag time from the rest of the nation.

Home values here kept rising for a year after values began falling in most of the rest of the country and now Seattle is seeing sharper drops in prices just as price declines in many other metro areas are moderating.

However Seattle owners pale in the equity blues department compared to some sun belt states. About 82 percent of all houses in Las Vegas, 70% in Phoenix and some 62% in Orlando, Fla., are “underwater”, according to Zillow ‘s estimates.