I don’t know the answer but my thoughts are that the sales volume for lower/middle housing levels is down, while the volume of sales for mid/upper housing levels is up. This will end up raising the median for the county overall.

You know my feelings on macro level stats and announcements. They are useless. Focus on the area you want to buy or sell in. Even within a zip code you can have that happen. I recall a post thread awhile ago where it was pointed out that Poway was holding up well or something like that. When I looked at all of the listings that sold in Poway for that particular month of the year, and compared them to the same period a year before, I found the same phenomenah, that the median was affected by a few high end sales.

Just my thoughts…

I really really really think sales volume is much more important then median pricing.

Realtor

The mix has changed. Instead of heavy buying in East and South County, the buying is much slower and a larger percentage of it is in North County Coastal and Inland.

Thus the median goes up when measured area wide. The NAR also provided a solution in their statement the other day where they admitted that the condo and entry level market is virtually no existant.

Hence, if before, the market was one entry, one middle-class and one upper middle class and now it’s just one middle-class and one upper middle class, the medium moves up, even if each home get’s less.

OK. The 1.7% is only for resale houses (detached).

The title of the article is misleading since it says “Resale homes up 1.7%”. In the text this is changed to “houses” as stated in the data from DataQuick. The U-T has done this type of pro-real state reporting for years even if it means that the information is not entirely accurate or clear.

FWIW, I have often been baffled by Dataquick’s analyses and commentary. They must be using different data than the rest of us can get because they always seem to run counter to everything else I see.

For instance, Dataquick commented not long ago that during the last recession the average drop was 15%, but I could only identify just a couple of areas that “only” dropped by 15% on a house-to-house basis of comparison. The averages I saw on a regular basis were more like 20 – 25%, and I saw a couple market segments drop by nearly 40% off peak.

When Dataquick’s John Karevoll finally starts talking about big losses (if he ever does) THEN you’ll know that we’ve hit bottom and it’s time to buy.

Here’s how:

Imagine there are two neighborhoods, POOR and RICH. The Median in Poor in 2006 is 100k. The Median in Rich is 200k. In 2006, there are five sales, 4 in Poor, and 1 in Rich:

100k Poor
100k Poor
100k Poor
100k Poor

200k Rich

So the median is 100k.

In 2007, prices decline in both markets by 20%. Poor people stop buying, rich retirees jump in:

80k Poor
160k Rich
160k Rich
160k Rich
160k Rich

So the new median is 160k, up 60% from the previous year, although prices overall declined 20%.

When the volume of sales declines in cheap areas and remains steady in expensive areas, the mix of homes sold shifts toward the high end. Consequently, the overall median can go up, even while price in all areas declines.