We're Number 1! Oh, in Declining Home Sales...

Yeah, it's not the average of all price points, it's the "central tendency" of the set's distribution. But just to clarify, that's first-time home buyers, not the whole home-buying market. Even so, it's not great for that 43% who are still bidding against the rest of the market for the smaller pool of lower-than-median-priced homes--everyone wants a great deal.

I think LarryB is misconstruing what that means--the median home price is the price at which half of all homes are worth less and half are worth more. If only 57 percent of the population can afford to buy a home at the median price, that's terrible because it means only slightly more than 7 percent of the population can afford a home at the point at which the price distribution is clustered. In other words, almost half the population (43 percent) cannot afford the homes we're building.

The point about locality is valid, but as an overall statistic it's not meaningless and it's a bad sign.

Actually, that's a pretty good number as median is, by definition, the 50th percentile. This would mean that housing is affordable in Washington.

The problem with that number is that the whole state is too big a region for it to be meaningful. It doesn't account for differences in income and housing price by region. I suspect that there are many households in metro Seattle who are priced out of the market, but who could afford virtually any house in (for example) Pend Oreille county.

I think we have a ways to go before we hit bottom, which is bad in the short term for homeowners but good for prospective buyers.

57 percent of the state's first-time buyers have enough income to afford the median home price.

Woo hoo!!