I thought the median was a useless statistic? It seems that people on this forum like to knock the median when it’s going up (myself included) but then take it at face value when it’s going down. I’m not singling anyone out here, just trying to illustrate a point.
Instead, does anyone have access to median price/sq ft data? I believe this was one of the statistics that was used when the median was going up, in order to debunk it. i.e. balance of houses sold was trending towards larger houses, so the price was going up, but price/sq ft was actually declining.
I’m not arguing that prices are going down – it’s pretty apparent that they are. I do, however, think that we need to be careful regarding picking and choosing statistics that best fit in with our beliefs.
I’ve mentioned this a few times before, but it’s interesting to note that the YOY figure will continue to decline until November 2006 EVEN IF PRICES LEVEL OFF TODAY. Since the YOY figure is the one that people pay attention to (in the media anyway), it’s going to *seem* to get worse, even if it actually doesn’t. This, ironically, might feed the cycle to make it worse, even if it wasn’t going to get worse. (I think my head is about to explode)
