patrick.net

It isn't so. The median is rising because higher end homes are starting to lower prices, yielding more sales and skewing the median back up. Overall prices are still falling.

What's happened in the last month or two is that we've seen some of the $700-900k homes fall into range for conforming mortgages (when factoring in down payments). The market above $1m is still frozen solid.

When the 900k homes become 800k homes the 700k homes become 625k homes and so on.

The new forclosure moratorium may have an impact. I suspect we'll see fewer fire sales from the banks if they see a significant delay in the inventory that they were expecting, and the perceived higher median price will reduce the multiple offer situations that we're seeing on under-priced forclosures.