Hi Marco – the numbers posted in the Mercury News are useless, as are most of the articles they write based on these numbers. It’s not because the numbers themselves are false, but with faulty interpretation. The problem begins with confusion over what the median price represents and how it is calculated. It is simply the midpoint of the homes sold. Example: if 5 homes sell the first week of April ‘07 for $600K, $900k, $1 mil., $2 mil., and $2.5mil., the median would be $1 mil. Then in April ‘08, only 3 homes sell with prices of $875k, $900k, and $3 mil., so the median price is $950k. The Merc. would report prices down -10% and sales down -40%. While this may be factual, there are two reasons why this info is not useful: a very slow market provides too few data entries and weekly comparisons are too short of a time frame. This is not unique to Palo Alto. If you follow the Mercury News statistics weekly, it’s not unusual to see many zipcodes that are down -30% one week and up +30% the next.
Median price is only a reliable measure of long term trends over wide areas. The key to proper valuation will not be found in the pages of the Mercury News and you can’t arrive at the value of any individual home based on the median price of a zipcode.
I hope you find this, and my previous posting, useful in understanding the market. Emphasis mine — madhaus

So basically the tech guy, who doesn’t seem to understand that the median of 875, 900, and 3000 is actually 900 (not 950), is complaining about using the median as an average (which he doesn’t understand) and that he’d prefer the arithmetic mean, which tends to respond more to outliers.

I think I’d go with Dataquick over this “tech guy.” But a real estate pro such as Roland wouldn’t be discrediting numbers he doesn’t like, would he? And note his other helpful comment, those numbers are down because there aren’t enough sales that week. Except we know the DQ numbers are a 4-week trailing indicator, so nice try, Roland.

When will you be posting more useless data?

Some notable quotes:
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Ha ha! RealEstater forgot mention that the guy said that is a “Real Estate Pro” (Ronald Marcos). Atleast he did not introduced himself is an average hitech guy.

Here are some explanations about the useless data Madhaus extracts from the Mercury News each month:

http://www.trulia.com/voices/Home_Selling/Real_estate_sales_in_palo_alto_in_-33376–

Some notable quotes:

“the numbers posted in the Mercury News are useless, as are most of the articles they write based on these numbers. It’s not because the numbers themselves are false, but with faulty interpretation.”

“I think it may have been Mark Twain that said “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
The fact is that statistics cannot really lie, but the data becomes so convoluted and confusing that it’s difficult to arrive at a rational conclusion.”