Lies, damned lies, and statistics

The latest QV House Price index shows the average house price in Auckland is $1,041,957 and everyone is thinking (especially the opposition parties and those complaining of not being able to afford a house) that all houses in Auckland are now more than $1m. Barfoot & Thompson, Auckland's largest realestate company, has just released the follows stats:

Total volume of Barfoot's sales in Aug17 - 777 properties, of which only 35.5% were over $1m. That means the remaining 64.5% of their total sales were under $1m (including 11.6% under $500k). When we start using average and median prices, we tend to forget how these are calculated and just focus on these numbers. Instead of releasing month averages, maybe QV could release data by different bands of value (e.g. number of houses below $500k, etc) for different suburbs.