Bugs, you are right. Median prices for a few selected zip codes are not a reliable indicator of a trend.
To understand where the high end market in OC, or any other market, is going, I prefer to look at prices per sq ft and aggregate across all the relevant zip codes. Specifically, calculate the % change in price per square foot separately for each zip code, and then average across all the zip codes relevant to the market you’re looking at, weighting each zip code by the number of sales in that area.
I did a version of this for OC. I arranged all of OC’s zip codes by the April 2007 price per square foot, in increasing order. I divided them into 10 groups so that each group had about 10% of total April 2007 sales. For each zip code I calculated the % change in the price per sq ft from 2006 to April 2007. Within each of the 10 groups, I then averaged the resulting %’s, weighting each % by the number of April 2007 sales. Here are the results:
There’s one obvious defect with this calculation. I didn’t have the price per sq ft for April 2006, so I had to use the price per sq ft for all of 2006. But the data seem to say that that the lower half of the OC market is doing worse than the top half.
