Median home prices in Santa Cruz up slightly to $661,000 in Apr...

The median sales price for single family homes in Santa Cruz County was $661,000 in April, up from $650,000 in March.

[meaningless]

meaningless statistics.... give me a break! what good is the median when only 3 homes sold!

[SC Midtown]

Only 3 homes sold?! Yikes, I think we're in deep you know what already.

I've heard the median home price doesn't mean much anyway because it usually just reflects how much the highest price homes had to drop their asking price to sell.

[lower ocean local]

kick out the medians, they don't deserve homes anyway, dang median aliens..........lol just kidding

[Sales up 50 percent]

meaningless wrote:

meaningless statistics.... give me a break! what good is the median when only 3 homes sold!

Actually, there were 114 sold last month, up from 75 the month before. I imagine we will start hearing from local real estate and mortgage people crying that the market has recovered and NOW is the time to buy.
Local statistic are available at http://www.ror.com/html/stats.htm

[lower ocean local]

who cares, i can barely pay my rent

[meaningless]

go ahead and twist those numbers! sold! welcome to america!

Sales up 50 percent wrote:

<quoted text>
Actually, there were 114 sold last month, up from 75 the month before. I imagine we will start hearing from local real estate and mortgage people crying that the market has recovered and NOW is the time to buy.
Local statistic are available at http://www.ror.com/html/stats.htm

[bad measure]

median is a terrible gauge of the health of the market. as the bottom rungs freeze up the sales which continue in the high range inflate the median and give a false picture of overall health.

but yes, I am sure the housing bubble parasites will latch on to this stuff and scream "buy buy buy! All is well".

[Joe]

It's time to buy when the realtors are selling off their 2nd homes

[Nate]

bad measure wrote:

median is a terrible gauge of the health of the market. as the bottom rungs freeze up the sales which continue in the high range inflate the median and give a false picture of overall health.
but yes, I am sure the housing bubble parasites will latch on to this stuff and scream "buy buy buy! All is well".

Wrong.

From http://www.ror.com/html/stats.htm (click the Median price link and read the text below the graph):

"Sales under $500,000:
April: 28% of the sales (Overall median was $661,000)
Sales over $1,000,000:
April: 17% of the sales (Overall median was $661,000)"

Which leaves 55% of sales between $500k-1m, with more sales a the low-end. The average price is also up from $707,546 in March to $737,816 in April (though the average is more susceptible to skew from outliers on the high-end), and the unsold inventory decreased.

Not saying the housing crunch is over, or that prices will be up from here, but the data disagrees with you.

[take another puff]

right! right you are!

bad measure wrote:

median is a terrible gauge of the health of the market. as the bottom rungs freeze up the sales which continue in the high range inflate the median and give a false picture of overall health.
but yes, I am sure the housing bubble parasites will latch on to this stuff and scream "buy buy buy! All is well".

[Henry]

Too bad he cannot produce a subset that excludes Watsonville or South County. Then you might see how little prices have come down in Capitola, Santa Cruz and the like.

[disabuser]

Henry wrote:

Too bad he cannot produce a subset that excludes Watsonville or South County. Then you might see how little prices have come down in Capitola, Santa Cruz and the like.

Actually he or anyone with access to the MLS could. I'd expect that Ganges has done this had the reporter asked, he would have supplied it. That segmentation of the market has been noted in some articles.