Rich made some comments along this topic on the main page today. He explained that the Case Shiller index is a better indicator of price movement. For his own analysis, he used the OFHEO data, which tracks the sale of THE SAME home over time. This cannot be used for new homes, and the OFHEO data lags by many months, bec. the gov’t seems to take forever in compiling their data.

If you want to know how prices are changing, use Case Shiller index or OFHEO index. Forget the median.