Statistics -- they never seem to tell the whole story.

Trulia just put out a report picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle on their sfgate.com site that carried the headline "15 SF neighborhoods where median price is under $1M".

(Click to go directly to the Trulia report where the map is interactive and shows not just San Francisco neighborhoods but all across the country).

I get that the point of the story is to show how unaffordable housing has become in our city.  But they're not comparing apples to apples. 

For example, the median selling price in 2018 for a home in the Tenderloin and Civic Center neighborhoods is $852,000.  Those neighborhoods are two of the fifteen that are still under one million.  Compare that to the neighborhoods of Potrero Hill and Dogpatch where the median sales price this year has been $1,210,000 and has been over a million for at least two years.

However, the median size of the properties selling in the Tenderloin and Civic Center is a one bedroom, one bath home in 745sf.  Compare that to the median in Potrero Hill and Dogpatch which is a two bedroom, two bath home in 1,020sf.  The cost per square foot in both areas is virtually identical ($1,144/sf in the Tenderloin and Civic Center vs $1,142 in Potrero Hill and Dogpatch).

That exposes one of the problems of lumping all residential sales into one median or average number, especially when you're trying to compare relatively small geographic areas such as city neighborhoods.

If you want a true comparison using these neighborhoods as an example, take a look at the median cost of a one bedroom, one bath condo.  In the Tenderloin and Civic Center area the median sales price for this year so far is, as noted above, $852,000.  The median sales price in Potrero Hill and Dogpatch is actually lower -- $807,000.  (It's also smaller -- 695sf vs 745sf).

Averages/medians don't mean a lot to a prospective buyer or seller if they lump all homes (studios and mansions alike) together in one number.  That's why our sales reports look at specific configurations of single family homes and condos which gives a truer picture.