Why do the numbers swing so much when there aren’t many sales?

Statistics like median price or days on market describe the “typical” market. When there are lots of sales, a few unusual ones get outweighed by the rest. When there are only a handful, each individual sale carries a lot of weight.

Say a small town has 4 closed sales in a month, and one of them is a $1.2M lakefront home. The median price jumps. Next month, if all 4 sales are modest starter homes, the median drops sharply. The market didn’t change, you just had a different mix of homes close. With 400 sales, one lakefront home wouldn’t move the needle.

Low volume also means the mix of homes (size, age, neighborhood, price tier) changes a lot from month to month, and that mix drives the stats more than actual market conditions do.

How to read it: Don’t draw conclusions from a single month in a low-volume area. Look at longer time periods (quarterly or year-over-year), and pay attention to the number of sales behind each figure. A big percentage change on 5 sales is usually noise, not a trend. You can also add more areas to the analysis to increase the properties being analyzed.