The average condo in Sacramento County sold for $248,895 in November, a .2% increase (huh?  See the statistical notes below) from last November’s average of $248,451.  The median price, however, fell 9.5%, from $245,830 last November to $222,500 this November.  The average sold price per square foot fell 8.3% during this time, from $209.84 last November to $192.35 this November.

Some 22.8% of the condos that sold in November were bank foreclosures, much lower than the overall sold foreclosure numbers of 39.9% for Sacramento County.  Similarly, just over 41% of active inventory is either a short sale or foreclosure, significantly less than the approximately 50% number we reported earlier for the Sacramento County residential inventory as a whole.

Possible Problems with the Sample Size

One of the problems you have to be aware of when dealing with statistical data is sample size.  In general, the bigger your sample, the better you can make sense of numbers like averages, median, etc.  Thus, when you talk about the average life span of an American, you want as big a sample as you can find.  If you Google “Sample size and confidence” you’ll start to get a feel for the problem.

However, in dealing with monthly real estate data, the sample size is often smaller than we’d like, but in order to say anything meaningful, we have to deal with what data we have.

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