Don’t believe everything you see in the media. You probably hear that all the time, but surprisingly, most people still do- especially when there are numbers- statistics to back up the claims. But there are many ways to look at data. People mine it, disect it, twist it up, slice it into pieces and then put it back together again to make whatever point they are trying to make. But different people can make the same data look entirely different by the way the present it and by choosing the pieces of that information that will best suit their needs. So what does this mean? Well, if nothing else, it at least should tell us to be careful not to simply take stats for the way they are presented.

Case in point- Average Sales Price. What is an average sales price and what does it tell us? Well, again that depends on the data being used. Here’s what I mean…

If the “average sales price” for an area (residential homes) is $280,000 and last year the average sales price for the same area was $290,000 does that mean that property values have gone down?

Absolutely not. It may simply mean that more lower-priced homes have sold this year than last year. Maybe this year twice as many homes under $280,000 have sold than last year and less homes higher than $280,000 have sold this year. Even if each of the homes that sold this year appreciated by 10% over last year, just by having more lower-priced homes sell the “average” would make it look like the values have gone down.

And this is how the media finds it’s stories and makes some markets look much worse than they really are. In Salt Lake the local newspapers have ran stories about the average sales prices and how prices are down, then a day or two later there are stories about how we are still leading the entire nation in appreciation (as recently as the end of June) with over 15% price increases as of the end of the second quarter (end of June). So how is it that average sales prices are down, but prices are still rising? Because the report that shows prices rising seperates home-sales by zip code, so you see home prices compared to prices from last year in the same zip code, not how they compare to the entire county.